Time is a strange creature. It crawls when we need it to run, and it races when we’re desperate for one more breath.

For parents with a sick child, time doesn’t pass — it attacks. It leaps over sleep, devours days, and presses on their shoulders with a weight that feels physical. Every minute matters. Every silence matters more.

That’s why the Stollery Children’s Hospital has meant everything to northern Alberta. Even tucked inside the crowded University of Alberta Hospital, the Stollery is where hope clings on — stubborn, fierce, unyielding.

Families walk in scared and walk out steadier because the people inside those walls refuse to surrender a single child without a fight.

So when news broke that the long-promised stand-alone Stollery is finally breaking ground on Edmonton’s south side, it felt like the universe finally whispered, “It’s time.” Time for kids to have a hospital built for them — not borrowed space, not squeezed corners, but a place designed with intention, love, and dignity.

But that timeline — five to eight years — stings. Some families standing in the Stollery today will never see the ribbon-cutting. Some children battling now won’t reach the new building. That truth lands hard. Yet the new Stollery matters for the next families, the next crises, the next miracles. You don’t stop planting trees because some won’t live to see the shade.

Just as that hope brightened, another story crashes in — darker, heavier, immediate.

The UCP government is clawing back $200 of the new federal disability benefit from Albertans on AISH. Two hundred dollars may sound small until you multiply it by 77,000 people. Until it becomes $170 million stripped from those who already stretch every dollar like a lifeline.

Then came the Alberta Disability Assistance Program — unveiled with polished talking points and zero consultation. Not a single meeting. Not one disabled Albertan invited into the room. Policies made about them, without them. It sends a message — sharp and unmistakable: disabled Albertans are not worth listening to. And that is unacceptable.

Because when a government chips away at supports this essential, it sends more than a budget signal. It tells people who rely on AISH that they do not matter. That dignity is optional. That survival should come second to savings. And when that message sinks in, imagining a future becomes........

© Edmonton Sun