The steam clock in Gastown, Vancouver in January, 2022. In a 2019 survey of about a quarter-million British Columbians, 93 per cent voted in support of permanent summer time.Jackie Dives/The Globe and Mail
It’s not quite bread and circuses, but switching to permanent daylight saving time is the sort of populist move that will make people cheer in the short term without really making their lives better.
That analysis may not be welcomed by millions of Canadians who moved their clocks forward on the weekend and don’t relish the thought of falling back again in the autumn. That extra sun in the evening is valued, particularly by the residents of a northern country.
Many Canadians will look enviously at British Columbia, where the government announced last week that most of the province will stay permanently on daylight saving time.
Clocks set to spring forward on Sunday, while B.C. adopts year-round daylight time
The move is likely to be immensely popular, at least for now. In a 2019 survey of about a quarter-million British Columbians, an astonishing 93 per cent voted in support of permanent summer time. There are very few issues that have such North Korean-like levels of support.
The issue of switching between summer and winter time is contentious but one thing is clear. There’s no doubt that changing the clocks is not good. Which leaves the more controversial question: which time should be used year round?
Unfortunately for sun-starved Canadians, the answer is winter time. That aligns better with our circadian rhythms and has better health outcomes. Which is why British Columbia’s change may not last.
For what it’s worth, moves by the United States during the oil crisis of the 1970s and Russia in the past decade to use summer time permanently became unpopular as people experienced dark mornings. Both countries soon switched back.
What Globe readers had to say about B.C.’s decision to move to permanent daylight time
Ways of messing with time to maximize sunlight date to the Roman era. But the concept of daylight saving time began in what is now Thunder Bay in 1908. The idea spread during the First World War and about one-third of countries use it.
Advocates often argued that the practice saved electricity or coal. Retailers believed that more light in the evening led to increased window shopping.
These arguments have a bit less resonance today. Modern technology is more energy-efficient and lighting is only a small percentage of a household’s energy consumption. And the rise of online shopping makes store visits in the evening a less important part of merchant revenue.
As the benefits of switching to summer time waned, the downsides of the change became better known.
Moving the clocks forward is associated with less sleep, more traffic collisions and worse health outcomes, including rises in strokes and heart attacks. Some of these same effects are linked to the autumn fall-back, though less so because it is comes with an extra hour of sleep.
The best solution would indeed be to stop changing the clocks. However, when picking between permanent summer or winter time British Columbia has made the wrong choice.
In the winter, the sun is at its highest around noon, with daylight split between morning and afternoon. Taking one hour of light from the morning and moving it later in the day, as summer time does, has a cost.
This coming winter, the sun will not rise in Vancouver on the shortest days until nine in the morning, and in Prince Rupert until around 10. That’s pretty grim.
A later dawn also boosts the risk for drivers and for children walking or bicycling to school. And being forced to start the day with a few hours of darkness will mess with people’s natural body clock, which would prefer to align with the sun, affecting sleep, health and mood.
However, this is the way the trend is going. Multiple Canadian provinces and U.S. states have proposed moving toward permanent summer time, usually with the caveat that adjacent jurisdictions would have to make the change at the same time. British Columbia had earlier said it, too, would not change unless neighbouring states did as well.
The head of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade last week criticized the decision to make the change unilaterally, saying the move would create problems for businesses operating on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
While moving to permanent summer time is popular, the pains aren’t obvious. For many, evening light is more useful than in the morning, making it easy to ignore downsides that can seem theoretical or likely to be borne by someone else.
Which makes it so fitting that B.C. announced this policy shortly after introducing a budget that projects a record deficit. Bread today. Stomach-ache tomorrow.