What Is It with the UCP’s Alcohol Problem?

Dale Nally doesn’t seem like the brightest bulb in Premier Danielle Smith’s relatively low-wattage cabinet. Still, Nally’s Kentucky bourbon tour mini-scandal is the kind of problem that could easily have been avoided.

Just for starters, if you’re going to fly out of town to discuss the business of booze, there might be something to be said for not posting photos on your social media accounts with glasses of the stuff in your hands, as Nally appears to do from time to time.

Few eyebrows were raised back at the end of August when Alberta’s United Conservative Party government announced that the Morinville-St. Albert MLA, who holds the insignificant Service Alberta and “Red Tape Reduction” portfolios in Smith’s cabinet, was off to Louisville to “meet with lawmakers and industry leaders to gain insights into the legislative framework behind bourbon’s legal designation, the creation of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and strategies that have successfully attracted investment and visitors.”

Most Albertans cynically suspect precious little of value happens on such junkets, regularly taken by members of the UCP cabinet. They know that’s just the way Conservatives in this province have done business since time immemorial and nobody gets too exercised about it.

It probably wasn’t the wisest course of action, though, for someone on Nally’s staff to hire a ride service that bills itself as “Kentucky’s Premier Private Bourbon Tour Experience” and that bills customers several thousand dollars a pop, as it were. It appears not to have occurred to Nally, at any rate, that it might have been wiser just to have rented a van and either politely declined a drink at each stop or instructed a teetotalling underling to get behind the wheel.

After all, in public life, expenses should not only be reasonable; they must appear to be reasonable.

Surely someone on the UCP staff would have expected the Opposition to comb through the expense receipts when they were published and discover “taxi” receipts totalling more than $4,000.

In question period on Wednesday, Marie Renaud, the NDP MLA for the neighbouring St. Albert riding, rose to remind the house that while the Trump trade war on Canada raged, Nally “opened up Alberta to American booze while almost every other province kept it off the shelves.”

“Then three months later he ran up a nearly $4,000 tab on Albertans’ dime on a bourbon tour in Kentucky,” Renaud continued in the lead-up to her question. “How did the minister’s expensive taste tests of Kentucky bourbon help Alberta families in Morinville-St. Albert?”

Nally replied: “We went to Kentucky to meet with their legislators. We met with some of their independent offices, and yes, we met with some of the distillers.... We wanted to use that information to help inform us of how we could brand Alberta whisky in the same way they branded Kentucky bourbon.”

The neighbouring MLAs have a testy relationship. Renaud shot back: “Given that the minister’s expense records list the booze cruise as taxi fare — although what taxi company has a slogan that says, ‘You sip; we drive’?... will the minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction apologize for this booze cruise and pay back all the money he spent?”

Nally, obviously irritated, huffed: “This is going to come as a shock to the NDP, but international missions are a core part of our job. Unlike the NDP, United Conservatives are focusing on growing Alberta’s economy, and yes, that includes our distilleries.”

Needless to say, this made good viewing in social media video clips.

On Thursday, facing more questions on the same topic from Calgary-Currie MLA Janet Eremenko, Nally got up in the assembly and declared that “there was no booze cruise. This was a trade mission.”

Alberta Hansard says this was followed by “interjections.” We all know what that means. When the interjections died down, Nally resumed, complaining: “It’s unfortunate the NDP continue to not be encumbered by the truth. There was no booze cruise. This was a trade mission to Kentucky. They have a $10-billion bourbon industry. It’s the biggest in the States. In Alberta it’s less than $750 million. We have a lot to learn.” (That would include, I would suggest, how to make good whisky. But, je digresse.)

Alas for Nally and his staff, “Kentucky’s premier private bourbon tour experience” just doesn’t sound like a trade mission, which is the sort of thing usually done in boring old office boardrooms.

Dull boardroom photos on social media might not engage readers as much as colourful shots of the minister standing in front of barrels of bourbon or hoisting a glass, but it certainly would have reinforced the claim this was a serious business trip.

This gave Eremenko, the Opposition mental health and addictions policy critic, the opportunity to ask: “Given that no regular Albertan could ever expect to send their boss a bill for $4,000 of multiple days of a booze cruise and claim it as transportation, given this reeks of entitlement and a flagrant abuse of the very policy that ministers are supposed to uphold, and given this is yet another example of government waste that Albertans are utterly fed up with, will the minister apologize and pay back every cent for this outrageous expense?”

The answer to that, of course, remained “No,” the minister will not.

The government’s problem with this issue still wasn’t over. On Friday, the NDP published a news release quoting Renaud. “When you factor in flights and accommodations for Nally and his entourage, we now know Albertans were handed a $20,000 tab all while struggling through the UCP’s affordability crisis and Trump’s tariffs,” she said.

She called the trip Nally’s “ill-timed, tone-deaf and extravagant waste of taxpayers’ money.”

So, what’s with the thing the UCP seems to have about booze?

Embarrassing UCP public drinking has been front and centre ever since the Two Jasons, Kenney and Nixon, recorded themselves in a 2019 video toasting each other and the monarch with cans of Alberta-brewed beer and declaring an end to the “war on fun,” as they termed limits on consumption of alcohol in public parks.

Since then we’ve had 2021’s “Shields up” scandal, boozing and associated bad behaviour behind locked doors in the legislature building’s cabinet offices that led to the departure from cabinet of then-agriculture minister Devin Dreeshen.

Dreeshen was invited back into cabinet less than a year later in the fall of 2022 by Smith, who had been sworn in two weeks before.

In June 2021, there was the boozy and unintentionally public mid-pandemic Sky Palace patio party featuring cheap Irish whiskey and no COVID masks. This contributed to the downfall of Kenney.

In 2023, we saw the “day drinking with Dale and Larry” video, wherein Nally and his pal Larry touted a plan to serve beer in convenience stores.

Less than two months after that, Peace River MLA Dan Williams rose in the legislative chamber while the house was in session for a sophomoric beer-chugging performance, earning him the lightest of taps on his wrist by the Speaker. Less than three months later, Smith rewarded Williams with a cabinet post.

Smith isn’t going to be holding Nally “accountable for incompetence and the disrespect he has shown Albertan taxpayers,” as NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi demanded in the party’s news release. After all, as Nenshi pointed out, “we know Danielle Smith won’t do that because she was also taking taxpayer-funded trips to the U.S. during Trump’s economic war on Canada.”

So what’s next? According to the NDP, it’ll likely be “how much Dale Nally is charging Albertans for his trip to Las Vegas... to promote gambling.”