• Trudeau may have made the "bedrooms of the nation" phrase famous but it was actually coined by The Globe and Mail's Martin O'Malley.  Trudeau thanked O'Malley for the quotation.

• Trudeau first entered politics when he won a seat in Parliament for the Liberals during the 1965 national election. He was soon given the portfolio of Justice Minister and introduced the Omnibus Bill on Dec. 21, 1967.


• Canada's first Criminal Code was adopted in 1892. Trudeau called his Omnibus Bill "the most extensive revision of the Criminal Code since the 1950s" and believed it brought "the laws of the land up to contemporary society."

• The Oxford Dictionary defines omnibus as "serving several purposes at once; comprising several items". Trudeau's bill was originally named 'An Act to Amend the Criminal Code,' but later became known as the Omnibus Bill because it ran 72 pages in length and contained 109 clauses in total. It was officially known as Bill C-150 when John Turner became Justice Minister in 1968.

• Other nations in the Commonwealth, such as England and Australia, had a parliamentary history of packaging disparate topics together in one large bill. The 'homosexuality clause' of the Omnibus Bill was based on the United Kingdom's Sexual Offences Act of 1967.

• Contrary to popular belief, the bill did not attempt to decriminalize homosexuality, but instead established a distinction between public and private sexual acts. The bill only stated that certain sexual acts (such as sodomy) between consenting (homosexual or heterosexual) adults aged 21 years or older, when performed in private, were legal. The presence of more than two people made such acts 'public' and therefore still considered illegal.