Starting at 2 a.m. Sunday, clocks roll back one hour in most of Canada as Daylight Saving Time comes to an end for this year.
Daylight Saving Time, which begins in March every year, is a relatively recent invention: northern Ontario’s Port Arthur was the first town in Canada to start changing its clocks twice a year in 1908.
The concept was originally proposed by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, but he’s widely thought to have been kidding. The idea came up again in the 1890s and started to pick up steam.
Germany was the first country to implement Daylight Saving Time, starting in 1916. It made the change as a way to cut back on coal costs. Daylight Saving wasn’t widely implemented in North America until 1966, when it was standardized in the U.S. through the Uniform Time Act.
What you should do:
Clocks go back one hour starting at 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 4. When you get up Sunday morning, make sure to change your clocks — and especially your alarms.
Places that don’t have Daylight Saving Time:
Of course, don’t change your clocks if you’re in one of the various parts of Canada that doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time, which include:
- Most of the province of Saskatchewan
- Peace River Regional District, B.C.
- Fort Nelson, B.C.
- Creston, B.C.
- Pickle Lake, Ont.
- New Osnaburgh, Ont.
- Atikokan, Ont.
- Quebec’s north shore
These places aren’t that unique, either — much of the world doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time. Most African and Asian nations don’t have it, and even the European Union is currently considering abandoning the practice. That would leave it as an almost entirely North American quirk.
WATCH: Return of Daylight Saving renews debate of changing the clocks
What the time change might do to you:
An extra hour of sleep sounds great, right? Unfortunately, like all time changes, it’s likely to have an impact on you.
A Global News analysis of 10 years of car accident data found that nine more pedestrians, on average, are hurt or killed in Toronto during the week following the time change. Various research studies in the U.S. suggest that this is linked to the evening rush hour suddenly going dark.
Getting an extra hour of sleep could also trigger headaches in people who are already prone to them, according to the Canadian Headache Society. The time transition has also been linked to a slight increase in diagnoses of depression and the rate of strokes.
Slowly adjusting your bedtime over a few days, rather than all at once, can help to mitigate the negative effects of a time change, according to Stuart Fogel, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa.
—With files from Patrick Cain, Kyle Benning, Patricia Kozicka and Dani-Elle Dubé