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Daylight saving time ends Sunday. Why B.C. is right to ditch the clock change

Opinion: It saves lives, it increases productivity, it’s free, and everybody loves it

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On March 2, British Columbia enacted a wildly popular new policy that, according to decades of accumulated research, will increase productivity, improve mental health, reduce hospitalizations, streamline daily life and even save lives.

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What’s more, it’s free. Or, it could have been free if B.C. hadn’t insisting on frontloading the whole process with reports, surveys and various other political ditherings.

Daylight saving time ends Sunday. Why B.C. is right to ditch the clock change Back to video

Starting March 8, British Columbians will henceforth live under permanent daylight saving time. The province will perform one last “spring ahead” clock change, and then dwell permanently in “Pacific Time,” rather than the prior system of “Pacific Standard Time” during the fall and winter, and “Pacific Daylight Time” during the spring and summer.

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B.C., like the rest of Canada, as well as Europe and the United States, first adopted daylight saving time as an emergency energy-saving measure during the First World War.

With resources at a premium, the idea was that by extending daylight hours during the summer months, countries could reduce the amount of energy needed to light interiors in the evening.

As to why the practice persisted following the Armistice, the reason in Canada seems to be that citizens simply enjoyed the longer summer evenings. For the first time in their lives, Canadians who lived at lower latitudes were able to see the sun set after 9 p.m.

As one booster wrote in a 1918 edition of the Vancouver Sun, “it has proven so delightful and beneficial that it will no doubt be left as a permanent institution after the war is won.”

There was no good evidence during the First World War that the experiment ever worked as intended.

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But in the decades since, any broad analysis of the energy-saving powers of the measure has usually been inconclusive, or worse.

In 2008, the National Research Council of Canada published a 26-page report finding that any energy being saved by DST was probably being cancelled out by increased energy use in other areas.

“There is general consensus that DST does contribute to an evening reduction in peak demand for electricity, though this may be offset by an increase in the morning,” it read.

That same year, a study out of the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the energy consumption of millions of Indiana households, and determined that daylight saving time was causing it to go up instead of down.

“We estimate a cost of increased electricity bills to Indiana households of $9 million per year,” read an abstract.

More recently, two 2017 Canadian studies came to opposite conclusions. In Ontario, daylight saving time was potentially reducing electricity consumption by 1.5 per cent. In Alberta, it was increasing electricity demand by 1.6 per cent.

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“DST does not have a universal effect on energy use,” read an analysis published by the C.D. Howe Institute.

Meanwhile, the science is much more conclusive in terms of calculating the harms wrought by daylight saving time.

Daylight saving time forces the entire population to alter their sleep patterns, yielding millions of people who are groggier and less alert all at once.

A 2016 U.S. study calculated that between 2002 and 2011, DST was responsible for 30 deaths from automotive crashes.

A 2008 analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine found that DST-related sleep disruption was causing heart attacks to spike. “Our data suggest that vulnerable people might benefit from avoiding sudden changes in their biologic rhythms,” it stated.

A report in the Journal of Applied Psychology found in 2009 that workplace injuries increased after the spring clock change. And, like many of the other studies into the harms of DST, this wasn’t counteracted by an increase in safety after the fall clock change.

“We therefore conclude that schedule changes, such as those involved in switches to and from daylight saving time, place employees in clear and present danger,” the report said.

All of the benefits of ending DST are well-known to Western governments, which is probably why killing the measure is such a common political promise.

But if DST is a totem of bad government policy, it’s also a totem of how governments can hold onto bad policy for years simply through inertia.

The Ontario legislature passed a bill in 2020 to end DST, but only if New York State and Quebec did the same. As such, 10 more clock changes have passed without any end in sight.

Alberta put it to a referendum vote in 2021, only for the clock change to win by the most narrow of margins. Asked if they wanted to adopt permanent daylight saving time, 50.2 per cent said “no.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has promised multiple times to end DST, only for every Congressional bill proposing as much to go nowhere.

Even B.C. determined all the way back in 2019 that most British Columbians hated DST. A survey commissioned at the time found 93 per cent in favour of ending it, and the government at the time even laid all the requisite groundwork to end it with the stroke of a pen.

Nevertheless, it took nearly seven years to be given final approval.

As to what finally spelled the end for B.C.’s dubious 108-year experiment with clock changes?

“We had committed to wait for our American partners,” Premier David Eby said on Monday. “But the reality is that they’re stuck. And we want to help give them the push that they need. Someone’s got to go first. To be fair, the Yukon went first and we thank them for that. But we’re going to give them a push.”

According to Eby’s opponents, it was pure political cynicism.

In the words of B.C. Conservative MLA Gavin Dew, “it’s a transparent effort to change the channel — a smoke bomb to distract from this government’s litany of failures.”

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