Senators still see areas for improvement in pot legislation

Three senators say even though the cannabis legalization bill has left their chamber, they see areas where more work is still needed.

Bill C-45, the government's main legislation, passed a final vote in the Senate on Thursday night.

It will now head back to the House of Commons, where MPs will decide whether to accept or reject the virtually unprecedented 46 amendments the Red Chamber made.

Those amendments included some fairly significant changes to proposed rules on home growing, advertising and parents sharing pot with their children.

"I have no idea what the reaction will be," Sen. Tony Dean, the independent senator who sponsored the bill, told The House.

In Question Period on Friday, both the health and justice ministers thanked the Senate for their amendments and said they would be carefully considered moving forward.

Despite question marks over the government's full response, Dean said the Senate did their job.

Conservative Sen. Denise Batters, though not completely happy with the bill, agreed the chamber tried to handle the legislation the best way possible.

"We are the body of sober second thought, we try to make pieces of legislation better."

The amendments were thorough, but some senators are still struggling to accept that certain suggestions didn't make the final cut — like a minimum age limit, according to Batters, whose party has been staunchly opposed to legalization since the beginning.

"I remain very concerned about the mental health impacts on our youth," she said.

Another controversial point in the bill was consultations with Indigenous communities. A few weeks before the final vote, the Senate's Aboriginal Peoples Committee recommended legalization be held off for up to one year while further talks were done in at-risk communities.

However, those fears seemed to be mitigated by a letter from the justice and health ministers, sent Wednesday to Indigenous Senators. The ministers vowed the government would continue to work with Indigenous communities, even after the bill is passed.

Indigenous senators, like Mary Jane McCallum, say that will be key.

"We cannot continue to look at criminalization as a way out," she told host Chris Hall. "It's not a way out for Indigenous people."

She added that throughout the process she had to carefully weigh the troubling lack of consultations against the need for decriminalization.

The bill may have left the chamber, but all three Senators agreed that the work isn't over yet.

There's no roadmap for taking a drug from prohibition to legalization because it's never been done before. That, in itself, could present a huge challenge.

"We cannot go through it smoothly, but I believe Canadians will step up to the plate," McCallum said.