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“(Crooked) Hillary Clinton confirms she will not run in 2020, rules out a third bid for White House.” Aw-shucks, does that mean I won’t get to run against her again? She will be sorely missed! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 5, 2019

“People ask me,” said Obama, “what did you look for putting together a team? No. 1 was integrity . . . which is why I was able to get out of there after eight years without a scandal,” Obama said to perhaps his largest cheer of the event.

Surely, the SNC-Lavalin scandal rocking Ottawa couldn’t have been far from the minds of the listeners, or the almost weekly scandals coming out of Trump’s administration since he was sworn into the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2017.

In just two years, five of Trump’s advisers have been criminally convicted and more than 40 senior staff or advisers have either been forced out or resigned — which is unprecedented in U.S. presidential history.

It’s ironic considering that Trump vowed “to drain the swamp” during the campaign for the presidency, and just last Wednesday, Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, called Trump a “racist,” a “con man,” and a “cheat” before a U.S. government committee.

What else did Obama look for when he established his cabinet and the rest of his White House team?

“I’m not intimidated by having people who are smarter than me around the table. You can’t know about everything,” he said.

Trump, by contrast, has surrounded himself with sycophants and family members.

Obama told the crowd that they have every right to be proud of the work they do in Alberta’s energy industry since “oil and gas have powered . . . Canada’s economy, the U.S. economy and powered the world . . . and is still the cheapest means for us to power everything that we do.”

But, he warned, climate change is forcing us to change.

“Either we are going to do it intentionally or thoughtfully and seriously, or it will happen to us,” he said. “All of us are going to have to recognize that there are trade-offs involved with how we live, how our economy is structured and the world we are going to pass on to our kids and grandkids.”

He said all this before he flew off to B.C. and that next huge payday. We all struggle with hypocrisy. You can’t win ’em all, but it sure beats that elephant.

Licia Corbella is a Postmedia opinion columnist. lcorbella@postmedia.com