The federal government made another step towards the legalization of marijuana yesterday by announcing the drug will be legal on October 17.

This news comes the day after the Senate passed Bill C-45, a piece of legislation that Swift Current Mayor Denis Perrault believes the federal government may have rushed and not realized the burden they're placing on municipalities.

"From the federal government down to the province and obviously down to all the municipalities, it becomes a municipal issue," he said. "It is under our jurisdiction, so we've gotta figure out how to do that [policing and bylaws] and how to navigate."

The City is yet to release any bylaws so far, other than where the two retail cannabis stores allotted for Swift Current can be located and where potential cannabis production operations can exist.

"We've gotta determine what kind of bylaws we're going to have to put in," Perrault said. "We've got to come up with a way that we can police, patrol, and set those bylaws."

Both cannabis business lottery winners have already begun discussions with the City, but a fixed business license price hasn't been set in stone just yet.

"If this becomes a significant amount of time on our City standpoint, trying to figure out, trying to navigate, we will ultimately have to put in some sort of fee," Perrault told one of the proponents. "I don't want to, I don't want to discriminate from one business from the next. We have a $100 business application fee that we have in our community to have your business license and I think that should be fair for all of our businesses."

According to Perrault, the legalization of cannabis will increase costs for all municipalities across Canada as far as policing, patrolling, and bylaws.

"We don't know what's coming in, we don't know our costs are going to be, and we don't know the impact to our community yet," he said. "There is so much uncertainty in regards to this."

Neither the federal or provincial government have announced how much revenue they will be sharing with municipalities.