Senate passes marijuana legalization bill

It’s now up to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet to choose the date the law will take effect. The legislation gives provinces eight to 12 weeks to prepare for the sale of recreational marijuana.

Earlier, Senators backed down on an amendment to the bill that would have recognized the authority of provincial governments to ban home cultivation of marijuana plants if they choose.

The Trudeau government rejected that amendment and senators then voted 4535 against insisting on it.

The government rejected 12 other amendments approved by the Senate. Among the other Senate amendments rejected by the government was one that would have prohibited any marijuana-branded swag, such as T-shirts and ball caps. The Senate has cleared the way for pot to become legal across Canada.

Senators voted Tuesday night to pass the government’s legislation to legalize cannabis — Bill C-45 — by 52-29.

But senators felt most strongly about the home cultivation one.

With senators bowing to the will of the elected House of Commons on that issue, that cleared the way for them to finally pass Bill C-45.

Quebec and Manitoba have already decided to ban homegrown weed, despite the fact that the federal bill specifies that individuals may grow up to four plants per dwelling.

The Senate’s amendment was intended to avoid legal challenges of the provinces’ constitutional authority to prohibit home cultivation.

On Monday, Sen. Peter Harder, the Liberal government’s representative in the upper house, argued that senators had done all they could to study the bill thoroughly and recommend improvements. He said it was time to respect the decision of MPs, who would be accountable to their constituents in next year’s election.

“With cannabis legislation, Canadians are ready for us to move forward,” Harder told the Senate, predicting that “there may come a day, perhaps in the not-so-distant future, when we remember prohibition as absurd.”

Harder argued that the approach the upper house took to the bill would be studied by students of history as a shining example of how the so-called chamber of sober second thought was supposed to operate.

In particular, he applauded Indigenous senators for raising concerns about the lack of consultation with Aboriginal communities. That forced the government to make a written commitment to more consultation and increased funding to help communities deal with the potential negative fallout from legalization and cash in on the potential economic windfall.

Harder said their role “demonstrated once again that the Senate has come into its own as an effective, influential and, indeed, indispensable platform in Parliament for the voices of Indigenous Peoples.”

Five different Senate committees minutely examined various aspects of the legalization bill, hearing from more than 200 witnesses.

The eyes of the world are turning to Canada to see how it handles legal pot.

“Canada is moving into a place that no country — other than Uruguay — has ventured to go,” Eric Costen, director general for the federal government’s cannabis legalization and regulation branch, told a conference last month.

Only Uruguay has made recreational marijuana legal at the federal level.

He said the federal government received valuable advice from Colorado and other U.S. states that have legalized recreational marijuana.

In Britain a major debate has sprung up about medical marijuana over the confiscation of medicinal cannabis oil, banned in the U.K., to treat a 12-year-old boy with severe epilepsy.