Justin Trudeau needs a win.

The Liberal ledger of broken, under-delivered or endangered promises is growing.

Electoral reform was simply tossed overboard for political expediency.

A national climate pricing program has nothing but trouble ahead and confrontation over the nationalized Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is all but guaranteed.

Relations with Washington are at a nadir and a trade war will bite the middle class the prime minister has purported to champion.

Indigenous reconciliation was over-promised but even the lowest-hanging symbolic fruit of that initiative, the inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, now only pierces the public consciousness for all the wrong reasons.

Hence the need for a relatively clean rollout of legalized recreational marijuana — a signature promise of Trudeau, one that can restore his progressive bona fides and one which would most definitely buoy a government that is finding danger at every turn.

Predictably, the clean roll out kept hitting speed bumps. At one time, July 1 was going to be pot legalization day. Now, it is U.S. retaliatory tariffs day.

The Senate considered the cannabis bill for seven months. Five committees heard from more than 200 witnesses.

It was a level of diligence that bordered on obstructionism, or at least an attempt to keep punting legalization closer to an election year where inevitable hiccups could be highlighted.

Trudeau made just such a charge this week, but Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, citing his party’s minority in the Senate, said the pace of approval in the Upper House was Trudeau’s responsibility.

Regardless, it was Scheer’s Conservatives who led the Senate opposition and were hammering away at it in the Commons question period Thursday.

The government will now send the bill back to the Senate, after rejecting most of the Upper Chamber’s 46 amendments.

There, senators should take a bow, congratulate themselves for their great work and resist any impulse to continue a fight over a promised piece of legislation from a democratically elected majority government.

Quebec, Manitoba and Nunavut, with the Senate’s backing, may feel that the battle for provincial primacy now rests on their desire to ban homegrown pot in their jurisdictions, but this could not possibly become a mountain to die on for the Senate.

Whether the provinces are claiming four (or fewer) homegrown pot plants constitute a danger to children, abuses their right to set their own regulations or put an undue burden on law enforcement, this can hardly be an issue to shake the country.

When government statistics say there were at least 5,869 opioid-related deaths in this country between January 2016 and September, 2017, the idea of cops using resources to count pot plants in Winnipeg condos is absurd.

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As we move toward legalization, the government should be pushed on issues more substantive than Senate concerns with indoor plants or T-shirts with cannabis leaves on them.

One of those issues was laid out in the Commons by Marilyn Gladu, who stepped away from Conservative fear-mongering to explain the situation in her border riding of Sarnia-Lambton.

Without assurances from U.S. Homeland Security, legalized cannabis is taking us to a thickened American border and possible tragic consequences for uninformed pot smokers.

Cannabis residue or even the odour of cannabis is enough for border agents to send Canadians to secondary screening. Possession of cannabis could get you a lifetime ban from the U.S.

Gladu says U.S. border agents have told her they will not hire more screeners, so some searches will simply be done in the crossing lanes and they are anticipating wait times to increase 300 per cent.

A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says the matter has been consistently raised in conversations with his U.S. counterparts. Given the state of Canada-U.S. relations, Canadians deserve something more concrete.

The Liberals have also remain coy on what they will do about people with criminal records for simple pot possession, disproportionately Black and Indigenous Canadians.

The government owes them an easy way to have those records expunged and Goodale says once the law is changed, fairness will follow. But anything short of a blanket pardon is hypocrisy, as Canadians will otherwise face roadblocks to advancement because of a criminal record for something that’s not illegal anymore.

Conservatives can no longer moralize. This ship is sailing.

We can’t get bogged down on homegrown plants and T-shirts when Liberals still have important work to do at the U.S. border and in our criminal system.

Tim Harper is a former Star reporter and a freelance national affairs columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @nutgraf1

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