No time for stolen hours

I’m a time zone and time change veteran.

I spent almost two years living in Saskatchewan, where the clocks never change from Central Standard Time, and you just learn to live with it.

I also spent many years living in a province knocked askew from the top of the clock, where, when everyone else was celebrating New Year’s at midnight, we were already at 12:30 a.m.

I’ve lived in the Newfoundland time zone, along with Atlantic, Eastern, Central and Mountain zones, along with every one of their spring-forward, fall-back time changes.

I even lived through one of the zaniest time changes ever instituted in Canada, but more on that in a bit.

I don’t like them — time changes, that is. Falling back is OK — you get your stolen hour back, and maybe, if you sleep soundly, you’ll get to feel like you’re sleeping in for a few days in the autumn while you adjust to the change.

But springing forward? I do like the longer evenings, having more light after work.

But this past week, I was reminded of just how much I hate the actual experience.

I go to work early.

Two weeks ago, I was starting to feel like the winter might in fact come to an end — I’d wait at the bus stop in the solid dark, the leafless trees looming in the streetlights, but by the time I got off the bus, the dawn was starting to needle up over the horizon above the Winnipeg Nomads football field. A thin line of almost lemon light on the very edge of horizon, above it a wide patch of dark-velvet blue — but still, already blue — and by the time I reached work, an honest-to-goodness slug of morning had arrived.

This past week, that hopeful light was gone again. The cold white of snow under streetlights, the hard 3D-printed-misery of boot-stomped frozen slush underfoot. Wrenched out of bed an hour earlier than usual in the pitch dark, I found it hard even to collect the energy to pull on my socks.

Parents of school-age kids have to prise groggy, grumpy children out of bed, and while everybody adjusts pretty quickly, you can’t help but ask why it has to happen, year after year — especially because it’s an absolutely arbitrary decision.

But if you, like me, feel springing forward has its own distinct misery, let me tell you it could be worse.

Much worse.

It could be twice as bad.

For one fateful year, 1988, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador decided that, to make better use of daylight during the region’s short summers, the province would benefit from moving to double daylight time, springing ahead by two hours instead of one.

(Newfoundland already had a record of tinkering with time — as well as being 30 minutes ahead of Atlantic time, the province, when it was a country, was the first nation in the Americas to bring in daylight time, passing legislation to that effect in June 1917.)

You might ponder the idea and see extra-long summer evenings as a clear benefit.

I’m here to say don’t.

Don’t. Don’t do it. Just don’t. The changeover is a gut punch in the circadian rhythm — you get to have jet lag without ever leaving your own bed.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government of the day was, at that point, quite long in the tooth and looking for ways to garner support without having to spend money they didn’t have, so the idea of creating longer, daylight-rich evenings for barbecues looked like a easy and cheap political prize.

It wasn’t. Recovering from it in that first week was horrible. In addition to being twice as hard on the system — and the single-hour spring change to daylight time we all endure now is credited with an increase in heart attacks, automobile accidents and miscarriages — the change put the province even more out of line with other provinces. Making calls to mainland businesses meant doing the arithmetic of “what time is it there anyway?” and if you had to call someone in British Columbia, for example, the time difference was a whopping six and a half hours — your workday was ending as theirs began.

There were some people who really liked the change; others, especially parents of young children who had trouble getting their youngsters into bed because it was still fully daylight outside at bedtime, were less appreciative.

The general consensus, in the end, was that it wasn’t worth the hassle — especially for the system-rattling week after each change — and it should never be done again.

And that’s kind of where I am on the time-change scale.

Sometimes, when things are even worse, they serve to highlight that you don’t even have to put up with a still-harsh status quo.

I’m not really sure I care whether a decision is made at some point to keep daylight time year-round, or to keep standard time throughout the full year. I suspect permanent daylight time makes more sense — not too much daylight early in the morning, and sunset at its latest point at around 9:30 p.m. on the longest day.

But time changes themselves?

Saskatchewan has it right, and has had it right since the 1960s.

Stop doing it.

Russell Wangersky
Perspectives editor

Russell Wangersky is Perspectives Editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, and also writes editorials and columns. He worked at newspapers in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and Saskatchewan before joining the Free Press in 2023. A seven-time National Newspaper Award finalist for opinion writing, he’s also penned eight books. Read more about Russell.

Russell oversees the team that publishes editorials, opinions and analysis — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.