I had the most terrifying 20 minutes of my life yesterday morning. We received a voicemail from my six-year-old daughter’s school that she was marked absent, and that they were checking in on her.

The thing is, she had gone to school – her mom dropped her off and watched her go inside the building with her classmates. She’d missed the call from the school and received a voicemail, but when she called the school back, there was no answer. Just a busy signal.

I can’t even describe to you the blind panic that ensued as we worked to figure out what was going on. Rational thoughts that this is some kind of mixup were head-butted out of the way by the extreme fear that… well, insert any extreme, irrational fear here. They all crossed my mind. Nothing else in the entire world mattered. There was both a tunnel-vision focus on solving this mind-bending mystery, and absolutely no clarity of thought whatsoever. Just a blurred haze of panic. Those 20 minutes were in fact infinity. Every second felt in every cell of my body.

Finally we figured out that it was indeed a mix-up – my daughter needed to pee on her way in to the classroom, so she walked in late. I won’t get in to the specific details on how she was marked absent because, frankly, I’m not really sure yet, either. But what I can tell you is that it set my day off on the worst-possible foot. Try working on a complex political story with those kind of rattled nerves. Yeesh.

Anyway, let’s talk about Mark Carney.

- Stephen Smysnuik

Prior to becoming prime minister, Carney had staked his reputation as a global climate leader. In the last month, however, his government passed a budget that prioritized infrastructure projects that would burn more fossil fuels, rather than less. Never mind that whole pipeline thing.

It’s complicated, of course. On one hand, Carney has the economy to worry about. It was, in fact, the whole promise of his campaign. And unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on how you look at it – concessions do need to be made, environmental and otherwise.

Carney’s environmental policy (and he does have one) is clearly strategic –compromise enough to keep climate policy alive federally, while tightening the screws on industry. A pragmatic approach is necessary, because if this climate plan fails all together, it could be replaced by a climate-denying down the line.

Then again, the optics for a man who's staked his reputation on his climate stance are lousy. It would be one thing if Carney had never claimed to be a climate crusader, but he built his brand on being the adult in the increasingly warming room. The pipeline proposal, among other projects, reads as a capitulation to Alberta voters, or to the oil and gas lobby, or both, and feels like a betrayal to his environmentally conscious supporters. He's waving through fossil fuel infrastructure that locks in emissions for decades.

Ciao for now.