GORE WINS TOP CLIMATE HYPOCRITE AWARD

It was close, but in the end, Al Gore edged out Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the top Climate Hypocrite Award.

The award is the brainchild of Senator Jim Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, who has led pushback against climate hysterics in the Senate.

“Climate alarmists are eager to tell Americans that they need to take radical action, including going vegan, ending air travel, not having children and eliminating fossil fuels and nuclear energy, but they aren’t willing to back up their data or take the actions they prescribe to everyone else,” he said in a press release.

SAUDI ARABIA OFFERS TOURIST VISAS

It's 2019, and a mere couple months after lifting travel restrictions on their own women within the country, Saudi Arabia announced Friday it will offer tourist visas for the first time.

It's part of broader efforts to diversity its economy away from oil, and interestingly comes at a time when tourism in the strict Wahhabi Islamic kingdom is no doubt the last thing on holidaymakers' minds, given the Sept. 14 attack on Aramco facilities, and given there's still a war raging across the southern border in Yemen.

Though part of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 reform program to take the Saudi economy in a post-oil direction, we doubt there will be an influx of tourism anytime soon.

LIBERAL RIDING ASSOC. WITHHOLDING FUNDS

The candidate who replaced Eva Nassif for the Liberals in the Montreal-area riding of Vimy is being forced to rely on money from Ottawa to run her campaign.

The Liberal riding association is refusing to transfer its funds to the new candidate, Annie Koutrakis, because members are furious with the party for dropping Nassif fewer than three weeks before the start of the election campaign and for parachuting in another person.

Nassif had told the Globe and Mail she was not nominated to run in the Vimy riding because she did not publicly support Trudeau as a feminist following the SNC-Lavalin scandal, which led to the resignation of two female cabinet ministers.

Trudeau denied the accusation. He told reporters last Wednesday Nassif didn’t meet the standards of the Liberal party’s protocol for vetting candidates — but he did not elaborate.

GREEN PARTY'S ROBOT TAX

The Green party is proposing a “robot tax.”

Green Leader Elizabeth May says that every time a company replaces a worker with a machine, a Green government would make that company pay a tax equivalent to the income tax paid by that laid-off employee.

CHINA IS NO FRIEND TO CANADIAN FARMERS

Canada’s agriculture industry needs to recognize it is “not dealing with a friendly regime” when it comes to China and should focus its Asian growth ambitions on countries like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea instead.

That’s according to B.C.-based international affairs commentator Jonathan Manthorpe, who was part of a panel discussion on China at the 20th annual Global Business Forum in Banff on Friday. Manthorpe, the author of Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada, said China’s decision to block imports of Canadian canola, pork and beef in the wake of Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou last December is proof Canada has overestimated the strength of its relationship with China.

“I think this has to be a lesson that you can’t deal with China like any other country that abides by the law and diplomatic norms. And in that respect, we’ve been a bit naive in the past,” Manthorpe said in an interview. “Canadian farmers are in a difficult position because they are collateral damage on this.”

HOW'S THAT SANCTIMONY WORKING PM BLACKFACE?

In August 2018, Trudeau made headlines when he called out a woman for “intolerance” and “racism” after she heckled him at a rally in Quebec and asked him about “illegal immigrants.”

That incident led to an ongoing lawsuit that has received little public attention since it was filed by the heckler last December. In July, Trudeau was questioned in Montreal as part of the lawsuit.

In videos that circulated widely of the altercation — during a speech Trudeau gave to Liberal supporters at an event in Sabrevois, Que. — the prime minister can be seen telling the heckler that “this intolerance regarding immigrants does not have a place in Canada,” and later that “your racism has no place here.”

UKRAINE'S EX-PM SAYS INVESTIGATE H. BIDEN

Vice President Biden was the Obama’s administration’s point man in Ukraine and told the government that the prosecutor was corrupt and that he must be fired or it would lose a billion-dollar loan promised by the United States. Ukraine is poor and has been fighting Russian separatists, and so the man was fired.

The action may have been justified, but consider that this lawyer-son had built his career on his daddy’s influence, representing foreign and domestic companies dependent on the U.S. government’s whims and deliberations, and was making $50,000 a month as a director doing what? It is unclear because, as others have noted, he had no background in energy or anything else that would matter, just an interesting last name.

So one of the most corrupt companies in one of the most corrupt countries hires a neophyte for its board of directors whose only apparent qualification is his last name. And his father, looking to protect his son, gets the prosecutor investigating his offspring fired.