Premier Danielle Smith says with the province’s neighbours to the west moving to adopt year-round daylight time, it’s once again time for Alberta to consider abandoning the practice of changing clocks twice a year.
Premier David Eby announced Monday British Columbia will spring forward an hour for the final time Sunday, in an effort to make life easier.
That means it will be in lock-step with Alberta from November to March, and Alberta will sync with Saskatchewan from March to November.
In Canada, Saskatchewan is the lone daylight saving time holdout, with only a few border communities making the seasonal change.
Smith said along with most of Saskatchewan’s use of year-round central standard time, B.C.’s shift raises questions about whether Alberta should aim for consistency across the western provinces.
Almost five years ago, a referendum question was put to Albertans to keep daylight time year-round: permanently changing to summer hours and no longer turning clocks forward in March and backward in November.
Get breaking National news
The question, put to voters in the 2021 municipal election, failed by the narrowest of margins — 50.2 per cent to 49.8 per cent.
That, despite the results of a public survey released by the Alberta government in the spring of 2020, in 91 per cent of the 141,000 Albertans who weighed in said they’d like to stop changing their clocks twice a year and stick with DST.
Smith has previously mused about putting the issue on a ballot and now says her United Conservatives will take another look.
“Our government will take these recent developments under consideration and evaluate whether a similar change would be in the best interest of Albertans,” she said in a statement Monday.
Alberta has been on daylight time since 1971.
The former NDP government explored doing away with daylight time in 2017, but did not go ahead in part over concerns about the impact on airline schedules and starting times for NHL games.
As for this year, clocks “spring ahead” when daylight saving time begins this Sunday at 2 a.m.
— With files from Wolfgang Depner, The Canadian Press and Karen Bartko, Global News
Changing the clocks twice a year has NEVER been a good idea!
It’s a no brainer, so Danielle will need a referendum
get rid of it !
Except that Smitty will have them set their clocks an hour behind standard time and then rail against Canada for trying to steal an hour from each and every Albertabaman’s life.
Yes please! Just look at the statistics. After a time change people have more vehicle accidents, other accidents and health issues. Daylight savings time
changes might have been a great idea during World War 1, but that day has long since passed. I don’t care if we stay on standard time or daylight savings time as long as we stop messing up everyone’s circadian rhythm twice a year.
Time to rip the bandaid off, and stop pointlessly changing times twice a year.
So let the left coast be two hours behind in the winter, they will not be a province for much longer with the governments giving all away.
Oh ditch it, you will be fine.
Daylight saving time is not good, it’ll cause kids to walk to school while it’s still dark.
Standard time is much better.
Alberta didn’t give us the option for staying on standard time in the last vote. If they did, it would have won.