Overview
The Government of Alberta has reportedly become the first jurisdiction in Canada to use artificial intelligence (“AI”) in the initial drafting of legislation through the Alberta Whisky Act. Government officials and legislative counsel retained responsibility for review, revision and all levels of approval.
In Part 1 of our series, we examined the purpose of the Whisky Act, the intellectual property dimension of the “Alberta Whisky” designation, and Alberta’s province-specific production standards.
In Part 2 of our series, we discuss:
• the reported use of AI in drafting the Whisky Act;
• the opportunities, limitations and need for human oversight in AI-assisted legislative drafting; and
• international examples of governments using AI to support legislative and regulatory work.
AI Use in Legislative Drafting
The Whisky Act highlights a broader issue: what role should AI play in the development of legislation?
Minister Dale Nally, responsible for Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction, has described the drafting of the Whisky Act in the media as the appropriate test case for the use of AI because the subject matter is important, but comparatively lower risk because “there’s no lives that are going to be lost” and the entire process remained subject to government review. In reviewing the process, Minister Nally concluded that AI had been useful in analyzing data and building the foundational blocks of the bill.
These observations also imply some of the limitations of AI-assisted legislative drafting. Although AI may be useful for tasks such as identifying inconsistencies and synthesizing large volumes of information, drafting legislation requires contextual knowledge and judgment about policy objectives; social, privacy, economic, environmental, legal and other potentially relevant considerations; and how the proposed legislation may affect the real world (for an informative discussion on the use of AI and the law of unintended consequences, see, for example, Olga Mack’s Unleashing the Power of Frameworks: Analyzing Unintended Consequences in Legal Decision-Making).
There is also a risk of bias: because AI systems reflect the data on which they are trained, they may import assumptions or priorities that do not fit the specific conditions of the legislative initiative or that favour particular approaches reflected in such data.
For these reasons, human oversight remains essential. Legislative counsel and policy-makers must be able to review and assess all aspects of AI-assisted legislative drafting.
A Growing International Trend
Alberta may be the first Canadian jurisdiction to publicly acknowledge using AI to assist with legislative drafting, but it is not operating in isolation. A 2025 OECD study on Governing with Artificial Intelligence illustrates the growing use of AI in delivering core government functions, including drafting legal texts.
Recent examples suggest that most governments are, for now, generally using AI to support discrete, high-volume or labour-intensive tasks rather than to replace legislative judgment:
• Albania has appointed an AI system called Diella, the virtual assistant of its national e-services platform “e-Albania”, to a cabinet-level position as “Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence,” tasked with improving citizens' access to online public services and advancing the digitization of documents and state processes.
• The Chamber of Deputies in Brazil has expanded its “Ulysses” program to include an internal “Ulysses Chat” AI tool that will provide information about legislative procedures and services.
• The Italian Senate used AI to cluster similar amendments and flag potential filibustering.
• New Zealand's Parliamentary Counsel Office has tested AI to generate first drafts of explanatory notes.
• In 2025, the United Arab Emirates announced a Regulatory Intelligence Ecosystem intended to support the drafting, development, and implementation of regulations using AI-enabled tools.
• The United Kingdom recently used an in-house AI tool to sort more than 50,000 public consultation responses into themes in roughly two hours, as part of a water-sector reform. The AI tool will be used to analyse other consultation responses and is expected to save up to 75,000 days of manual analysis each year.
Take-Aways
The Alberta Whisky Act is significant on two fronts. From a business and regulatory perspective, it introduces a new provincial designation of “Alberta Whisky” and ties that designation to Alberta-specific requirements for ingredients and production. Licensed manufacturers in Alberta who wish to market “Alberta Whisky” will need to meet the new criteria. Alternatively, they may produce whisky outside the designation.
From a law-making perspective, the Whisky Act is an early Canadian example of AI-assisted legislative drafting. Alberta’s experience, alongside comparable initiatives abroad, suggests AI may support evidence-based law-making through research and data processing, comparison, and initial drafts in technical, lower-risk areas. However, human oversight remains essential to ensure that proposed legislation reflects sound policy and accounts for the full range of social, economic, financial, environmental, and other impacts.
More Information
Spanning agribusiness, food and beverage, intellectual property, technology and regulatory compliance, the Alberta Whisky Act reflects the increasingly connected issues facing businesses that develop, protect and market place-based products. Fasken's multidisciplinary teams advise producers, brand owners, and other businesses on the full range of issues, from liquor licensing and regulatory compliance to the protection of origin-based names and the responsible adoption of AI.
