Twice a year, we have to fiddle around with our clocks to adhere to daylight time with the goal to adjust our days to the changing amount of daylight as the planet revolves around the sun.
Here’s what you need to know.
What you should do?
Starting at 2 a.m. Sunday, most Canadians will need to roll their clocks back one hour as daylight time ends this year.
Daylight time begins in the spring during March of every year, as a way for people to make the most of the daylight. This was particularly useful when larger portions of the country’s population were devoted to farming and agriculture and needed more time to plant and harvest crops.
Because you roll your clocks forward in the spring and roll them back in autumn, a common mnemonic device to help people remember what to do is: Spring forward, fall back.
Although wrist watches, some clock radios and car timepieces will need to be tweaked, most digital clocks such as the ones on your phone or computers adjust their clocks automatically. So be sure not to make the mistake of adjusting them twice and check how your devices are programmed.
What places in Canada don’t have daylight time?
Although most of Canada adheres to daylight time, there are plenty of places that don’t, including nearly the entire province of Saskatchewan.
On the West Coast, several places in British Columbia including Creston, Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson's Hope, Fort Nelson, Peace River Regional District, and Tumbler Ridge all abstain from daylight time.
Then in Ontario, the citizens of Atikokan, Pickle Lake and New Osnaburgh don’t touch their clocks at any point in the year. If you live in Quebec’s north shore, you also avoid the drudgery of clock-tweaking altogether.
What could the change do to you?
There is plenty of science to back up the idea that daylight time could be affecting your health and could even lead to dangerous outcomes during the transition.
For example, it might seem intuitive that rolling the clocks back an hour leads to more sleep, but that’s wrong. Several studies indicate people’s sleep patterns — particularly in seniors and young children — are affected, which means they’ll be groggy for up to several days.
On CTV’s Your Morning, sleep consultant Alanna McGinn recommended that those with sleep issues in general avoid checking their phones before bed. This is to prevent the blue light emitted by the devices to interfere with your body’s circadian rhythms, which are primarily affected by light.
With that in mind, if you go behind the wheel, make sure you’re alert on the roads. There are studies that show a spike in the number of car accidents taking place during rush-hour periods, which can largely be attributed to driver fatigue.
There are also some studies that show higher rates of reported heart attacks during DST’s time switch.
Why do we do it?
Daylight time has only been used in Canada since the turn of the last century. It was only in 1908, that some communities in Northern Ontario started to adjust their clocks.
It wasn’t until 1966 that it was widely used across North America as a way for farmers to get more sunlight and to cut down on the amount of fuel people used to light the streets and their homes.
Before it was commonly used, the concept was mostly seen as a joke made up by American Benjamin Franklin in 1784. It only started being taken seriously during the 1890s. During the First World War, Germany became the first country to start using daylight time to save on energy and coal costs in 1916.
Should we get rid of it?
There are various groups trying to get rid of it to either cut down on health risks or because they feel it’s unnecessary.
According to the Norwegian website Time and Date, a slow trickle of countries have been ditching the daylight time each year. Although places in Canada abstaining from daylight time might seem like anomalies, most places around the world don’t bother with daylight time.
Despite more than 70 countries or one-fifth of the world’s 7.3 billion people fiddling with their clocks twice a year, at least 67 countries have stopped turning back their clocks altogether. Most countries in Asia and Africa don’t bother and the European Union is currently considering ditching it too.
Although, Canada as a whole is unlikely to reject it outright any time soon, one province did come close.
In 2017, more than 10,000 Albertans said in a government survey that they would support scrapping daylight time altogether. At the time, respondents said they supported Alberta’s Bill 203 which would have replaced daylight time with Alberta Standard Time.
The bill ended up failing due to critics claiming it would have had a negative impact on the province’s economy, especially if the rest of the western world still adheres to it.
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An earlier version of this story incorrectly described British Columbia as being on the east coast and said Germany had started daylight time in the Second World War when it should have said the First World War.
