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Dalton McGuinty is being spotted in public again. The former Ontario premier has apparently spent the last year trying to book dates for his university lecture tour “Climate Change: Can We Win This? Be Honest.” He has already addressed audiences at University of Toronto, Queens and more recently at the University of Windsor. He is scheduled to appear at Western University on March 23. Get those tickets while you can.

Maybe someone else in Ontario thought we needed our own C-list version of Al Gore. It would seem McGuinty thought so. After resigning as premier in October 2012 amid his government’s gas-plant scandal — for which his former chief of staff would eventually serve prison time — McGuinty had for the last several years wisely stayed largely low profile. But as the Trudeau government is showing in cranking up its climate campaigning this week in hopes of distracting us from its own scandals, Liberals often think talking about global warming will make people forgive, or at least forget sleazy behaviour. The prime minister’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, even said as much in his letter resigning over the SNC-Lavalin scandal, when he wrote, “Our kids and grandkids will judge us on one issue above all others. That issue is climate change.” What do trivial scandals about government corruption matter when the atmosphere might be warming up a bit?