Kelly Coulter, the woman who helped change Justin Trudeau’s mind about cannabis legalization, says she is expecting to be “a little bit emotional” on Wednesday.

Coulter, who is in the midst of launching her own marijuana farm in Nelson, B.C., will be thousands of kilometres away from Parliament Hill when cannabis becomes legal in Canada.

But even as she’s taking part in the festivities in Nelson, Coulter says she’ll also be thinking back to a meeting she had with Trudeau in his Parliament Hill office six years ago — when she was an advocate for marijuana and he was running to be the next leader of the beleaguered Liberal Party of Canada.

It was this encounter, in November 2012, which the prime minister has credited with opening his eyes to the benefits of legalization, after his long-time stance in favour of simple decriminalization.

And it was Coulter who encouraged Trudeau to see legalization as the best way to take the marijuana business out of the hands of the black market and organized crime and into the world of consumer safety and government regulation.

You could hear echoes of that argument, in fact, when Trudeau spoke to reporters briefly on Tuesday about how Canada would be a much safer place for young marijuana users on Wednesday.

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“By controlling it, by legalizing it, we’re going to make it more difficult for young people to access and we’re going to ensure that criminal organizations and street gangs don’t make millions, billions of dollars of profits every year,” Trudeau said. Few people would conclude from those remarks that the prime minister is planning any kind of pot party for the Hill on Wednesday — and that’s exactly the tone intended.

“I’m proud of him,” Coulter told me on Tuesday, as she was in the midst of preparations for Wednesday’s big party in Nelson. “He took a risk and the world will be a better place for it.”

Needless to say, Coulter’s view is not a universal one and the political risk-taking for Trudeau may not be over. While it is true that Trudeau probably won some votes in 2015 with his promise to legalize marijuana, he’s not likely to see a huge upsurge in support because he delivered on that vow.

Indeed, Conservatives such as Ontario Premier Doug Ford seem eager to paint cannabis legalization this week as another crazy idea in a series from this prime minister. You can see the ad slogans writing themselves already: Canada, Trudeau and Cannabis — Just Not Ready.

But what’s also true is that Trudeau would have been taking an even greater risk if he had postponed or walked away from this promise.

First of all, neither he nor the Liberals can afford to go into the 2019 election with such a major promise remaining undelivered. The failure to overhaul the electoral system or to get the budget balanced by 2019 — both firm commitments in the Liberals’ 2015 election platform — have used up a lot of voter goodwill on the broken-promise front.

Citizens have some tolerance — I believe more than pundits sometimes assume — for politicians who adjust their views on taking power.

However, this week’s legalization of marijuana also represents another symbolic bookend for Trudeau — not just to his long-ago meeting with Coulter, but a little farther back in 2012, to the Liberals’ first convention after their humiliating defeat in the 2011 election.

In January of 2012, federal Liberals were a dispirited lot, facing a lot of questions about whether the party would even survive. Global politics were only just starting to get polarized to the extent we see today, but many people (including this writer) were wondering what was the point of a middle-of-the-road party.

Two things happened at that convention in Ottawa on a very chilly January weekend in 2012. One, Trudeau started to get the idea that maybe he should run for the leadership of the Liberals. After dismissing the idea, even mulling over the idea of leaving politics altogether after the 2011 defeat, the 2012 convention got Trudeau and his team thinking about a leadership run.

Trudeau writes at some length about that convention in his 2014 biography, Common Ground, and how it lit the fires of his leadership ambition. Unlike other, past Liberal gatherings, he wrote, “it was free of factionalism and infighting, free of handwringing and finger-pointing about the past.”

The other big thing that happened at that convention was a 77-per-cent vote by delegates in favour of marijuana legalization. “As the third-place party, we had the leeway to discuss contentious issues we would never have considered as a governing party,” Trudeau wrote.

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As he stares down the shortening deadline to the next election — one year away this week — the flashbacks to 2012 are not incidental to this prime minister. He’s sitting in the job he is today because of events that year — the party convention, the conversation with Coulter.

What is happening in Canada can all be traced back to decisions Trudeau made that year.

I asked Coulter how she planned to mark legalization. Surprisingly to some, she is not a consumer of cannabis — just an advocate and a grower. But she said: “I might be tempted to take one puff.”

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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