The decision upheld consensual group sex and swinging activities in a club and alleged bawdy-house as being consistent with personal autonomy and liberty.

Jean‑Paul Labaye of Montreal was charged with operating a "common bawdy-house," a violation under section 210(1) of the Criminal Code, for owning the club l'Orage, in which persons who paid membership fees and their guests could assemble and engage in group sex and oral sex and masturbate.

The Court explored these definitions in depth, noting that values that can be said to be essential to society include liberty and equality.

Hence, indecency in Canadian law is something that threatens someone's liberty, exposes something undesirable to people, forces someone to commit a misdeed (this includes material "depraving and corrupting susceptible people" and "material that perpetuates negative and demeaning images"), or harms someone engaging in certain acts.

In examining the question of what cases in which people are exposed to things they do not want to see can be considered indecent, the Court was mindful that sex is a more open subject in society, but nevertheless "there may be some kinds of sexual conduct the public display of which seriously impairs the livability of the environment and significantly constrains autonomy."

The dissenting justices criticized the majority's definition of indecency as "neither desirable nor workable," since it did not follow certain precedent and discarded the "contextual analysis of the Canadian community standard of tolerance".

Moreover, the importance given to harm in R. v. Butler was "adopted to fill a vacuum," to connect past case law regarding community standards to views that some material encourages sexist attitudes, and "it does not follow from Butler, Tremblay and Mara that the courts must determine what the community tolerates by reference to the degree of harm alone."

In this particular case, the dissenting justices believed that the screening out of people who did not want to see the sexual conduct was not rigorous enough, and that "The community does not tolerate the performance of acts of this nature in a place of business to which the public has easy access."