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Lorne Gunter: If Alberta does away with time change, it should opt for standard time

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If you think Alberta should follow B.C.’s lead and make daylight saving time (DST) permanent this year because the semi-annual time shift makes drivers worse for a few days, or makes you groggy at work, or upsets your kids’ sleep, don’t ever fly to Vancouver or Winnipeg.

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Those two cities are (at least for now) an hour’s difference from Edmonton — one ahead (Winnipeg) and one behind (Vancouver). Since one hour is the same difference caused by springing ahead in March and falling back in October or November, and since you think that hour is inflicting horrible disruptions in your life and in society, don’t ever leave home and face the hell of being in a different time zone.

And don’t take a job where you’d have to do shift work. Good God, you’d be whiplashing back and forth from one end of the day to the other. According to the one-hour-ruins-our-lives theorists, shift workers must be in a perpetual state of grouchiness and impairment behind the wheel.

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Seems to me that worrying about a twice-yearly change of one hour is genuinely a First-World problem.

I am no defender of daylight saving time. I don’t care whether we switch twice a year or not. The change is entirely artificial. We neither gain nor lose an hour, we simply shift the existing number of hours around within each 24-hour day to make it feel as if we’ve added an extra hour in the evening.

What’s the point, especially at the 53rd latitude? Even without DST, the sun would be up until after 9 p.m. in June. What is gained by delaying sunset until after 10 p.m.?

I’m an early riser and would rather have the sun come up an hour earlier than set an hour later. One thing I dislike about the time change in spring is that we are just beginning to get daylight a bit earlier and — poof! — we’ll be nearly another month before we get it back at 7 a.m.

However, I think the one big problem often overlooked by people pushing for perpetual DST is the undesirable lateness of sunrise in December. The latest sunrise in Edmonton this past winter was 8:52 a.m. just after the solstice. Bring in permanent DST and that sunrise would have been at nearly 10 a.m.

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Kids would go to school in the dark. And it would be dark outside until they were well into their school day.

The same would go for commuters and office workers. Outside construction workers and tradespeople would work in the dark at least an extra hour and have to work under lights and potentially dangerous conditions.

If we are going to do away from clock changes, it would be smarter to stick with standard time year-round rather than leap ahead to DST. Standard time more closely follows the pattern of the solar day.

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If your concern about time changes is that they disrupt people’s circadian rhythms, prepare to have your rhythms disrupted for much of the year if we choose permanent DST rather than permanent standard time.

Remember, too, that Alberta held a referendum in 2021 on whether to switch to permanent DST. Those who favoured a permanent switch lost. The margin was tiny — 50.2 per cent to 49.8 per cent. Still could the results be overturned without another vote?

The only semi-good reason for going full-time to DST is if many other provinces are doing. But are they?

Manitoba says it currently has no plans to abandon the practice of switching spring and fall, which means if Alberta did switch, we would be the same time zone as Manitoba during winter.

Because Saskatchewan doesn’t change — it’s standard all year — we would match Saskatchewan’s time 12 months of the year, if Alberta switched.

And after this weekend when it goes on permanent DST, B.C. will be the same as Alberta in winter, if we continue our twice-a-year switch, in winter, the four western provinces would be the same time.

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