Carrying a torch for marijuana legalization, the Liberal Party of Canada emerged like a phoenix from Monday’s parliamentary election, rocketing from near irrelevance to win an absolute majority in the country’s House of Commons.

And now, supporters and political scientists say, the party likely will make good on a campaign pledge to make the Great White North the world’s next country to allow cannabis for recreational use.

"When can Canadians expect you to legalize pot if you're elected?" a reporter asked Prime Minister-elect Justin Trudeau in September. "We're going to get started on that right away," he said.

Trudeau takes office next month, and his government is expected to deliberate on the precise outlines for legalization before offering a proposal to Parliament.

“Oh, it’s going to happen,” Canadian Sen. Larry Campbell of the Liberal Party, a former mayor of Vancouver, tells U.S. News. “Certainly within the next four years, but I suspect a closer time frame is two [years].”

A Liberal Party majority in the lower house of parliament nearly seals the deal for marijuana legalization, experts say. Opposition is possible in Canada’s appointed Senate, which still has a Conservative Party majority, but the upper chamber rarely blocks legislation.

Unlike the highly political U.S. Senate, Canadian senators are appointed on the advice of prime ministers to serve until they reach age 75 and are expected to provide a detached review of legislation.

“Given a majority in Parliament, the Liberal Party should have no trouble decriminalizing or even legalizing the possession of marijuana,” University of Toronto political science professor Peter Loewen says.

Loewen expects greater debate on how to regulate sales, perhaps slowing the process. “I don't think it will be a first priority, but I imagine they will make some initial moves around consultation and study,” he says.

Jamie Lawson, a political scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, says the Senate could conceivably emerge as a roadblock, though he doubts it will. The risk may be even lower if the new Liberal government moves quickly, as the Conservatives are in a state of disarray, he says.

Lawson says the only asterisk on whether legalization happens then would be “if the remaining Conservatives decide to go all tea party-ish, and declare an early war on the Liberal agenda to raise their own team’s spirits.”

But Campbell, who has served 10 years in the Senate, doubts his colleagues would stand in the way.

“The Senate is the sober second thought and making sure it’s the best bill that it can be,” he says. “The Senate rarely, rarely blocks a bill, and if it does it’s usually, ‘We should take this back to the people.’"

“But this year we had a majority government that ran on this,” the senator says.

Recent polls show majority support in Canada for legalization. And Trudeau, the son of a former prime minister, made the remarkably frank admission – by American political standards – that he used marijuana while a sitting member of Parliament in a 2013 interview, a year after nearly 80 percent of delegates to his party’s 2012 convention put legalization in the party platform.

In contrast with Trudeau, none of more than a dozen major candidates seeking to become U.S. president in 2016 has endorsed legalization. Despite Gallup polling released Wednesday gauging U.S. public support at 58 percent, the most affirmative position taken by candidates has come from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent running for the Democratic nomination who said this month he “suspects” he would vote for a state-level legalization initiative.

"It’s an interesting contrast to Bernie Sanders," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance. "It’s not in [Sanders'] bones, but for Trudeau this seems to be something that’s a little more personal.”

Lawson says even if some Liberal Party members are less enthusiastic than Trudeau, Canadian political tradition likely will see his wishes become law.

"It should be quite easy for a majority government under our system to pass any criminal code reforms it wishes," he says. "The British-style parliamentary system leaves far less room than the congressional model for ordinary members to vote against their party positions, [and] Canada is one of the most insistent British-style parliamentary systems on this discipline."

Currently, Uruguay is the only Western country that has legalized the production and sale of recreational marijuana nationwide. It did so after residents of Colorado and Washington in 2012 passed ballot measures that cast off local criminal penalties and rolled out regulated markets. U.S. federal law still makes marijuana possession for any reason outside of highly restricted research a crime, but the Obama administration has allowed states broad leeway to regulate the drug as they see fit. More than half allow some form of marijuana for medical use, and four – with the addition of Alaska and Oregon last year – have laws allowing for recreational markets.

Legalization of marijuana for recreational use cannot happen province-by-province in Canada, as it has state-by-state in the U.S., as criminal law is wholly federalized there. Still, localities that have their own police forces are able to be more tolerant in practice.

Allowing recreational marijuana may not be such a leap for Canada. In addition to neighboring two U.S. states that have adopted the policy, Canada’s Supreme Court in June confirmed the nationwide legality of medical marijuana, after the country had regulated some of the world's largest legal marijuana-growing facilities. And in parts of Canada, there’s a flourishing cannabis culture that’s tolerated by local authorities.

Activist Jodie Emery of Vancouver, a vocal Liberal Party backer among cannabis enthusiasts, says she’s thrilled that the election puts her country on the precipice of outright legalization. Emery freely admits that she operates an “underground” vapor lounge where patrons pay a cover charge to smoke or vaporize their own marijuana. Her husband, Marc Emery – the so-called Prince of Pot – recently finished a prison sentence in the U.S. for mailing millions of pot seeds to Americans.

“We’ve put in decades of activism to get to this point," Jodie Emery says. Through upbeat about the future, Emery is concerned about the specifics of legalization, as are many longtime pot reform advocates in U.S. states. She advocates allowing people with criminal convictions to work in legal pot businesses and hopes businesses with on-site consumption will become explicitly legal.

“A fight we have ahead is the right for marijuana consumers to have equality with coffee drinkers and alcohol drinkers,” she says.

Tom Angell, an American legalization advocate, says developments in Canada may spur more U.S. states, such as Maine and Vermont, to jump on the bandwagon to avoid losing potential tax revenue. Maine is among a handful of states that may legalize marijuana through ballot initiatives next year. Vermont, many advocates believe, may be among the first U.S. states to legalize marijuana through legislation.

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Campbell says Canada's anticipated movement toward legalization is directly related to pioneering U.S. ballot initiatives.