Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to reporters before a caucus meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is accusing the Opposition Conservatives of playing games in the Senate with the Liberal government’s cannabis legalization framework.

Trudeau, when asked Wednesday morning about his government’s rejection of more than a dozen changes to Bill C-45 the Senate is proposing, defended the bill’s original intent of allowing Canadians to grow up to four plants per household — including in provinces with governments that wish to ban growing pot at home.

Then, just ahead of House debate on the amendments, he dropped a political barb in for good measure, attacking the Conservatives for playing “games” in the Senate with the bill.

“It’s been months that Andrew Scheer, the Conservative leader, has been telling his Senate caucus — the senators that he still controls — to play games, to slow this down, to interfere with the will of the House, with the commitment made by a duly elected government in an election campaign, and it’s time he stops using his senators this way.”

Later in the day, Scheer responded that Trudeau holds a majority government, and the Conservative Party is only in Opposition in both Houses.

“The majority of Senators have been appointed by the Liberals,” he said.

“If the prime minister is upset about the pace of legislation, he needs to talk to his own House leadership team and his Senate leadership team. The Liberals control the pace of legislation in both Houses.”

Senate Conservative leader Sen. Larry Smith also objected to the political jab. He said leadership in the upper chamber mutually agreed on a timeline for dealing with the bill, and noted various Independent and Liberal senators – not just Conservatives – supported the contentious amendments the Senate made to the bill.

“This idea that the prime minister banters about – that we’ve tried to be obstructionist and play games – we haven’t played any games,” he said. “We sat down with Sen. Harder at the beginning and said we want a process that works.”

The Liberals are rejecting a raft of substantial Senate amendments on top of the one allowing provinces to ban home growing — including a ban on marijuana-branded merchandise, and a public registry of investors and people working at cannabis companies.

Quebec and Manitoba already plan to prohibit homegrown cannabis, but the Senate’s changes would have avoided an immediate legal challenge over jurisdiction.

Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor said Canadians are already allowed to homebrew beer, wine and even grow tobacco at home, so they should be allowed to homegrow cannabis as well.

“It’s already possible for Canadians to grow cannabis for medical purposes and we absolutely believe that the legislation should be consistent when it comes to recreational cannabis,” she said.

The Senate had also removed the ability to sell branded cannabis swag to restrict cannabis companies from being able to stretch the marketing regulations. Conservative Sen. Judith Seidman tweeted that rejecting the amendment opens up a marketing “loophole” for “big cannabis.”

Interesting that while the govt supports legislation to ban ALL advertising of unhealthy food to kids they seem willing to permit this loophole in C45 for « big cannabis » to advertise marijuana to our kids on T-shirt’s, caps and phone covers @CDNMinHealth #C45 #cdnpoli — Sen. Judith Seidman (@JudithSeidman) June 13, 2018



But parliamentary secretary Bill Blair said the government is rejecting that over concerns the restrictions would be “almost unenforceable.”

“They could, as written, have resulted in situations like people working in the provincially run government store would not be allowed to use any kind of a brand logo identifying themselves as an employee of the store,” he said.

The Trudeau government’s Bill C-45 passed through the Senate at the final third reading vote last week, meeting an agreed upon timeline to deal with the bill by Senate leadership.

Senators made 46 changes to the bill, many of which were technical in nature.

MPs will next debate and vote on the Liberal government’s motion to send its decision on the Senate’s changes back over to the Senate. Then the ball is back in the Senate’s court over how to proceed after the House, presumably, nixes most of its key changes to the legislation.