Page:NCGLE v Minister of Justice.djvu/50

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Ackermann J

[50]In Canada, consensual adult sodomy (“buggery”) and so-called “gross indecency” were decriminalised by statute in 1969 in respect of such acts committed in private between persons 21 years and older.[1] Currently section 159(1) and (2) of the Canadian Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46 provides the following:

“(1) Every person who engages in an act of anal intercourse is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to any act engaged in, in private, between
(a) husband and wife, or
(b) any two persons, each of whom is eighteen years of age or more, both of whom consent to the act.”

According to Canadian law—


  1. Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69, SC 1968-69, c. 38, s. 7. “Buggery” applied to both same-sex and opposite-sex anal intercourse. ‘[G]ross indecency’ applied to sexual acts between any two persons, and “therefore potentially to all sexual activity between men or between women, and to opposite-sex oral intercourse.” (See Wintemute above n 62 at 150.)
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