Considering a unified prairie time zone

Manitobans have been invited to complete a survey at www.engagemb.ca, about whether this province should maintain the practice of “springing forward” and “falling back.”

This may support a government decision to stick with one time throughout the year, either central standard time (CST) or central daylight time (CDT).

The health benefits of removing the biannual time change and sticking with CST are highlighted on the survey website. Many of us will naturally prefer CDT.

I too love the long summer evenings we get in Manitoba with CDT. I have also lived in Saskatchewan, and I can attest that “getting up with the sun” at 4:30 a.m. in the spring and summer on CST is not fun, unnecessary, and I seriously question its health benefits.

The impacts of our seasonal time changes are of course more pronounced the further north you live in this great country.

In providing our survey responses, we should consider another key factor beyond sunrises, sunsets and health benefits — the economic benefits of living in the same time zone as our neighbours.

During construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway from 1881-85, Manitoba thrived on the promise of new opportunity. Winnipeg was the focus for CPR activities during this time and for many years afterward.

The CPR, and later the Canadian National Railway, established major operations in Manitoba, and from here, hundreds of communities across Western Canada were built and supported via rail.

We have been linked to these lands through geography, history, trapping, transportation and treaties.

However, we don’t operate on the same clock as the residents of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

It is interesting and timely that the whole concept of time zones was largely developed by a railway engineer, one who in fact worked for the CPR, Sir Sandford Fleming.

In 1876, allegedly after missing a train in Ireland, Fleming developed and advanced the concept of “terrestrial time” involving a system of 24 synchronized time zones around the world. Later in Toronto, in 1879, Fleming proposed Greenwich, England as the prime meridian — the base from which all time zones are compared.

Fleming was able to put it all together and over the next 50 years, his time zone system was adopted around the world. For years, several theorists struggled to make sense of local time, as the Earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours — creating darkness and light at different times across the globe.

This is complicated by our planet’s revolution around the sun during its 365-day journey, because the Earth is slightly tilted, at 23.44 degrees. This means seasons — winter (and more darkness) and summer (with more light) — that are the opposite of each other in the northern and southern hemispheres.

George Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand, is credited with proposing daylight time as a way to increase the time he (as a human) would have to catch more bugs; the bugs were already awake, apparently.

Later, other proposals would make the case for daylight time to reduce energy consumption, expand recreational opportunities and support agricultural production.

Apparently, the first community on the planet to adopt daylight time was Port Arthur which, with Fort William, later became Thunder Bay, Ont.

This brings us back to the current discussion of whether to keep the daylight time or not. Despite my own preference for CDT (GMT-6), I offer another important consideration.

With Alberta deciding to stay on daylight time, called Mountain Daylight Time (MDT), and Saskatchewan having not utilized daylight time since 1966 (so CST), Manitoba has, perhaps a once in once in a lifetime opportunity to forge deeper connections with our neighbours in the region.

This would mean Manitoba’s new permanent time would be CST (no more daylight time), resulting in the creation of a single, unified time zone across the prairies.

Let us consider the social, cultural and economic value of being in the Prairie Standard Time (PST) zone.

Manitoba aspires to be a “have” province, meaning that in the future we would depend less on federal government transfer payments and actually contribute more to Canada than we receive economically.

Today, Alberta is a “have province” and so is Saskatchewan, largely because of oil production — but also combined with substantial exports of agricultural products, critical minerals and other resources.

Manitoba’s economy has many of these attributes (albeit less oil), but we also have relatively low-cost energy, excellent transportation connections and plans to harness the potential of our province’s direct access to the world’s oceans, through the Port of Churchill and also possibly via Port Nelson.

Living together in PST would make communications consistent across the region, helping forge long-term partnerships, and demonstrating to the world that we are working together for our communities and for Canada — and there are those health benefits!

Bryan Oborne is Free Press patron who has lived and worked across Western Canada.