A time-sensitive issue to consider

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/11/2024 (516 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Well, you just went through the easy part, so you’re probably in the best sort of mood to consider the process.

If you woke up Sunday morning after the usual amount of sleep, you may have been delighted to find you had an entire extra hour to work with. The kids, of course, will be a little off kilter. Bedtime Sunday may have taken a little more finesse as you tried to get everyone back on schedule.

But it was almost certainly nothing like the hard part, the hard part that will be back next spring.

(Yes, this is meant to be a bit of a thoughtful distraction from, well, the complex and hostile rest of the world right now. A breather from the relentless bombardment of analysis of what’s unfolding to the south of us. And yes, we’re talking about the end of daylight savings time for the year.)

There are those who consider the springtime change to be nothing more than governmental theft. With the arbitrariness of provincial law, an hour of the day is wrenched from you. An hour of a Sunday — for most people, a day off. It’s taken. Whisked away. Some might even say stolen. And then, that hour is kept for the whole summer, before being offhandedly returned in the fall without so much as an apology.

Not everybody in the country goes along with the change.

If you’ve tried it, you’ll know that there are downsides to having the clocks stay the same all year round. The biggest outlier in Canada — Saskatchewan, our western neighbour — doesn’t mess with shifting the hours around, keeping Central Standard Time 365 days of the year, and it does deliver a kind of constancy. But when spring comes, it takes much longer for the evenings to stretch out with light. Plus, you’re suddenly out of step with other provinces, and remembering the time change for setting up out of province telephone meetings can suffer from inevitable confusion. You also don’t, in March, feel like you’re dragging yourself out of a black pit of misery on the first Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings after the time change to start your day.

Where did it come from?

It’s supposed to make the most use of the available daylight during the shortened days of winter. There have been arguments that it reduces morning automobile accidents and also saves energy on lighting homes.

And whose fault was daylight savings time in the first place? Some have pointed to Ben Franklin, but official Franklin historians say he was only making a suggestion that people change their sleep schedules, not their clocks, to reduce lamp oil costs. New Zealander George Hudson, an entomologist, suggested the idea in that country in 1895 — he apparently wanted more bug-hunting time in the evening.

Britain’s William Willett, a builder, championed the idea purportedly to allow himself to play more evening golf. If anything, his suggestion for changing the clocks was even more jarring than what we have now: his 1907 pamphlet, The Waste of Daylight, was self-published and suggested the clocks should move ahead by 80 minutes: 20 minutes in four separate steps through April, and then the reverse through September. No thank you. No thank you entirely.

There have been efforts to stop the process and put others on a Saskatchewan footing.

The latest, a bipartisan effort in the U.S. in 2022, got all the way through the U.S. Senate before getting stalled in a Congress committee and … running out of time.

Shall we continue it? Time will tell.

Enjoy the hour, while you have it. It seems more than likely that’s only until March.