File Photo (CBC).
On Sunday, Vancouver Island residents, along with most Canadians, will be turning their clocks back one hour as daylight saving time ends for another year.
The official end of daylight saving time is 2 a.m. on Nov. 5, although most people will change their clocks before they go to bed.
The change, which takes place in every province except Saskatchewan, will shift daylight back into the morning hours.
However, the Peace River Regional District of B.C., including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge is on Mountain Standard Time and does not observe daylight saving time. Fort Nelson is also on Mountain Standard Time.
However, there are rumblings across Canada and the United States that people are growing weary of moving their timepieces ahead one hour in the spring — losing an hour of sleep — and then turning them back in the fall.
The daylight-optimizing system, largely standardized across North America in the 1960s, is facing a new wave of challenges.
In Alberta, proposed legislation that would have ended the practice won overwhelming support in August when the public was asked to weigh in on the idea. Of the 13,000 submissions received, 75 per cent were in favour of scrapping the system.
However, the Alberta legislature shot down the idea this week after an all-party committee said the impact on business would be too onerous.
Still, those opposed to the system can always point to Saskatchewan, which rejected daylight saving when the idea took hold more than 50 years ago. To this day, turning clocks forward and backward is a foreign concept in all but a few corners of the province. Arizona is also an DST abstainer. Indiana held out until 2006.
Meanwhile, opposition to daylight time, which extends from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, has been gaining ground among the six New England states, which could have repercussions for the Maritimes and Newfoundland and Labrador.
In September, a special commission in Massachusetts recommended the state — now in the eastern time zone — should extend daylight saving year-round, but only if the other states in the region follow suit. Some of the other states have already tabled bills to make the change, though it could take years to accomplish.
The main goal, according to proponents, would be to add an extra hour of afternoon daylight in the winter. Such a change could increase productivity and curb on-the-job injuries and traffic fatalities, according to one Massachusetts study.
If the proposals are adopted, New England would become part of the Atlantic standard time zone, which would mean that its clocks would be synchronized with those in the three Maritime provinces between November and March.
It’s no secret that Canada, in general, has followed the United States in lockstep when it comes to making the most of the daylight hours.
That’s what happened in 2007 when daylight time was extended in the U.S. by a month in the spring and by a few days in the fall.
With files from Michael MacDonald, The Canadian Press
Alexa Huffman
