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Here we go again: Tick, tock, change the clock.
Despite years of talk and public and political pushes to end it, B.C. and most North American jurisdictions move ahead one hour this Sunday, March 10, for the beginning of daylight time.
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At 2 a.m. that morning, clocks should be adjusted forward, meaning we all lose an hour of sleep and mornings will stay dark longer and evenings will stay bright longer until late fall.
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What happens in November, when we normally revert to standard time, remains anybody’s guess.
However, it’s clear there’s broad support for stopping the back and forth in B.C. A 2019 poll conducted by the provincial government found that 93 per cent of nearly 225,000 respondents were in favour of staying on daylight time year-round.
That same year, then-B.C. premier John Horgan signed off on legislation that would end daylight time for good.
But that measure requires that the Cascadia states — California, Oregon and Washington — agree to do the same. Two of those states have passed laws to end the switches, but they need to be passed by a U.S. Congress, once again gearing up for the mass distraction that is the American presidential election cycle.
Bills introduced in the U.S. Senate last year and legislation in more than half of the U.S. states have pushed the idea forward, but those have stalled — often because, as in B.C., ending the practice is contingent on neighbouring states doing the same.
So here we are in 2024, carrying on like it’s 1916. That’s when Germany — followed by dozens of countries in Europe and North America, including Canada two years later — introduced a measure to observe daylight time.
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The original idea was to save energy during the constraints of wartime, by having people use less artificial light in the evenings, and to boost productivity.
That reasoning was again used to commit to permanent daylight time in the 1970s during the energy crisis. Daylight time has been in place in dozens of countries and most of the U.S. and Canada ever since.
Meanwhile, modern technology has largely negated the energy conservation rationale because we use electricity for much more than just lighting.
Supporters of ending the back and forth time switch say the change could prevent an uptick in car crashes in the days after the time change, as well as studies showing a slight increase in the rate of heart attacks and strokes.
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