Where Does the Canadian Federal Government Stand on Cannabis?

Canada legalised cannabis federally in October 2018. The United States — with 68% of its citizens supporting federal legalisation according to Gallup, still hasn't. For Canadian growers and consumers who have spent years navigating the Cannabis Act, watching America's slow shuffle toward reform is a study in political contradiction: a neighbouring superpower whose federal stance directly shapes cross-border research partnerships, trade frameworks, and the broader trajectory of North American cannabis policy.

A 68% Mandate With Nowhere to Go

Public opinion in the United States has never been clearer. Nearly seven in ten Americans support federal cannabis legalisation — a supermajority that cuts across party lines, age groups, and regions. And yet, when the 2020 Democratic primary field lined up, Joe Biden was the only major contender who refused to commit to federal legalisation. That position set the tone for everything that followed.

Biden's stance was never draconian. He went on record stating that people should not be imprisoned for using cannabis, and he pledged to ease the regulatory barriers around medical marijuana research. But "not draconian" is a long way from progressive — and for a country whose cannabis culture is as deep and diverse as its geography, it left tens of millions of advocates frustrated.

From a Canadian vantage point, the contrast is striking. Under the Cannabis Act, adult Canadians have had the legal right to possess up to 30 grams of dried cannabis, cultivate up to four plants per household, and purchase from licensed retailers since October 17, 2018. The federal framework is imperfect, and ongoing reforms continue to be debated in Parliament, but it exists. America, meanwhile, remains patchwork: recreationally legal in dozens of states, medically permitted in most, and federally classified as a Schedule I controlled substance — alongside heroin, everywhere.

The MORE Act: A Historic Vote With a Difficult Path

On April 1, 2022 — in what was emphatically not an April Fool's joke, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act. The vote was historic. Had it become law, the legislation would have accomplished the following:

1. Removed marijuana from the federal list of controlled substances entirely.
2. Established an excise tax framework on cannabis products.
3. Required breeders, producers, and importers to obtain federal permits.
4. Created pathways for expungement of prior federal cannabis convictions.
5. Directed tax revenue toward communities disproportionately harmed by the War on Drugs.

Meaningful legislation, clearly written, with genuine equity provisions built in.

The Senate, however, was a different story. The MORE Act was widely expected to stall in the upper chamber, where the filibuster and a narrowly divided Senate made passage impossible without bipartisan support that simply wasn't there. And even if it had cleared the Senate, observers were openly uncertain whether Biden would sign it. When asked directly, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declined to confirm whether the president supported the bill — a silence that spoke volumes.

The political calculus was not lost on anyone. Biden's hesitation risked alienating voters aged 18 to 39, a demographic that overwhelmingly supports legalisation and whose enthusiasm was already cooling. Signing the MORE Act could have re-energised that base; vetoing it would have confirmed the suspicions of progressives who felt he was governing further right than he had campaigned. Psaki did confirm Biden's support for narrower reforms: decriminalisation, expanded cannabis research, and protecting existing state-level medical programmes from federal interference. But full legalisation? Not on the agenda.

Campaign Promises: Kept, Broken, and Pending

Judging any president against their campaign promises is imperfect — governing is harder than campaigning. But the Biden administration's record on cannabis offers a revealing mix of follow-through and inaction.

Promises kept, at least partially:

• The November 2021 infrastructure bill included provisions allowing researchers to study cannabis actually purchased by consumers from licensed retailers — a meaningful improvement over the previous requirement to use only government-grown marijuana.
• The 2022 and 2023 fiscal year budget proposals maintained the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment, protecting state-legal medical cannabis programmes from federal interference.
• Biden upheld his pledge not to have the federal government override individual states' rights to determine their own cannabis regulations.

Promises unfulfilled:

• Biden had clearly stated his support for rescheduling cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule II under the Controlled Substances Act — a move that, while short of legalisation, would have dramatically expanded research access. As of this writing, no such action had been taken.
• Biden pledged to decriminalise cannabis but had not extended executive clemency to any federal cannabis offenders — a power the president holds without requiring Congressional approval.
• His Department of Veterans Affairs, as recently as late 2021, opposed a House-passed bill that would have required the VA to conduct clinical trials on cannabis's therapeutic potential for veterans. This stands in notable contrast to Canada's Veterans Affairs, which has taken a comparatively open stance on medical cannabis access under the Cannabis Act.

The administration attributed much of its slow movement to the demands of governing through a global pandemic — a reasonable explanation, though not a complete one. The veterans' cannabis research reversal, in particular, is difficult to reconcile with any pandemic-related justification.

Inside the White House: A Cannabis Culture That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Perhaps the most revealing window into the Biden administration's true relationship with cannabis came not from legislation, but from internal staff policy.

In early 2021, dozens of White House staffers who had disclosed past cannabis use during security background checks were reportedly asked to resign. The administration's messaging was careful — Psaki clarified that no one was dismissed for "marijuana usage from years ago" and that no staffer was asked to leave "due to casual or infrequent use during the prior 12 months." But the episode landed badly, and no amount of semantic precision fully defused the irony: an administration publicly supportive of decriminalisation was quietly showing cannabis users the door.

Then, in March 2022, it was reported that White House employees were prohibited from investing in cannabis companies. The conduct guidelines went further, noting that cannabis-related activity — even unwitting involvement, could "negatively impact" both hiring eligibility and security clearance.

Counterintuitively, some analysts read this not as a signal of ongoing prohibition sentiment, but as an acknowledgement of cannabis's growing economic legitimacy. If the federal government were genuinely indifferent to cannabis normalisation, it would have no reason to worry about conflicts of interest among its own staff. From Canada — where the cannabis industry is a regulated, taxable, publicly traded sector, the parallel is familiar: governments that begin treating cannabis like a real industry tend to be governments that are preparing to regulate it like one.

What It Means for Canadian Growers and the North American Landscape

For Canadians, U.S. federal cannabis policy is not merely an interesting news story. It has direct implications.

Cross-border cannabis trade remains illegal under both countries' federal laws. Canadian Licensed Producers cannot export recreational cannabis to American retailers. Seed banks and cultivators operating legally in Canada cannot simply expand into the U.S. market regardless of individual state legalisation. Banking relationships, research collaborations, and even inter-governmental data sharing are all complicated by the Schedule I classification that keeps American federal agencies at arm's length from cannabis science.

Federal legalisation in the United States would transform that picture overnight. It would open the door to a regulated North American cannabis market — one in which Canadian cultivators, with four-plus years of legal production experience and some of the most rigorously tested genetics in the world, would be extraordinarily well positioned. Strains like the White, the enigmatic resin-drenched feminised cultivar prized for its extraordinary trichome density and clean, versatile cannabinoid profile, represent exactly the kind of premium genetics that would command serious attention in a post-prohibition American market.

The passage of the MORE Act through the House — whatever its ultimate fate in the Senate, demonstrated something important: a functional majority of elected U.S. representatives are now willing to vote for federal cannabis legalisation on the record. That is a threshold that, once crossed, does not uncross. The political trajectory, even if the timeline remains uncertain, points in one direction.

Where Does This Leave Us?

Joe Biden is not a cannabis champion. He is, at best, a cautious incrementalist on the file — supportive of research expansion and decriminalisation in principle, reluctant to spend political capital on full legalisation in practice, and presiding over an administration whose internal cannabis policies have at times contradicted its own public messaging.

For Canadians who have lived under a federal cannabis framework since 2018, this can feel both familiar and frustrating. We remember the years of incremental progress, the political hedging, the task forces and consultations before the Cannabis Act finally came into force. The U.S. is navigating its own version of that journey — just on a vastly more complex political terrain, across fifty states with fifty different regulatory climates and a federal system uniquely resistant to top-down reform.

The MORE Act proved that federal legalisation in the United States is no longer a fringe position. It is a majority position in the House of Representatives. Whether the Senate, this administration, or a future one finally carries it across the finish line will depend on the voters Americans choose to send to Washington — and on whether political leaders ultimately decide that 68% of public support is too large a mandate to keep ignoring.

For ongoing coverage of cannabis legalisation developments on both sides of the border, explore the Legalisation section of the Pacific Seed Bank blog, where we track the policy shifts that matter to Canadian growers and consumers alike. The plant is already here. The laws are catching up.