Ontario and Manitoba have announced that they will go along with the US and extending daylight saving time by roughly a month. In case this is the first place you’re hearing the news, starting in 2007, we’ll moving our clocks ahead the glorious hour the second Sunday in March and then lose the privilege the first Sunday in November.


The US is doing it to save billions of barrels of oil a day. Although they don’t really believe in Kyoto, it seems like a pretty good motivation. They spent a number of years studying this to discover that household energy consumption is linked to how much time there is between sunset and bedtime. When we go to bed we turn off lights, TVs, stereos, etc. – things that make up about 25% of our home energy bills. I get the part about lights (more daylight = less lights), but why stereos and TVs? What’s happening in the sky doesn’t affect the total number of hours available between getting home from a day’s labour and slipping into bed. Maybe I should read the California study it’s all based on. I guess out there, and elsewhere, people go outside and play more during long summer evenings rather than cocooning up in front of the TV or suffering three months of Christmas music on the radio.

So why are Ontario and Manitoba doing it? Not for any lofty environmental cause, although they could have sold it that way to make us feel better, no they’re doing it to keep up with the Jones down south.

"It is important to maintain Ontario's competitive advantage by co-ordinating time changes with our major trading partner, and harmonizing our financial, industrial, transportation and communications links," said Ontario's attorney general, Michael Bryant. "This is in the best interest of Ontario."

How noble!

Maybe it’s not surprising. Worldwide time zones in the first place were instituted to facilitate business – train schedules to be exact – largely because of a Canadian, Sir Sandford Fleming. He was one of the main movers in convening the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington at which the system of international standard time was adopted.

A hundred years before all of that, though, Ben Franklin came up with the idea for daylight savings. His theory was that people could make better use of daylight if they weren’t sleeping through it. Germany and Austria were the first to actually implement Ben's vision in April 1916 to save energy during World War I.

In Britain, the initial proposal was to advance the clocks by 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and then reverse the process the four Sundays in September. When it was passed also in 1916 – and then started the following Sunday, none of this 2 years to get used to the idea – everyone was expected to add or subtract 80 minutes on four separate occasions. This caused mass confusion: when do we fire the 1 pm castle gun? what about tides? Some concerns were even more profound, as Lord Balfour explained:

[on the night the clocks are set back] Supposing some unfortunate lady was confined with twins and one child was born 10 minutes before 1 o'clock. ... the time of birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House.

Finally, in 1925, Britain adopted the more conventional one time change by one hour approach. In WWII, Britain tried out Double Summer Time by changing the clocks by two hours as an energy saving strategy too.

In Canada, it was first adopted in 1918, but the opposition from farmers was huge for whom it meant an hour’s more darkness during their morning work and great difficulty convincing cows and chickens to change their clocks. So, when the bill came up for review the following year it was defeated and so it was decided municipalities could make their own calls about the clocks. Most cities went for the change while rural areas didn’t.

The US went through a parallel process. It was passed in 1918, farmers hated it and got it repealed the following year. During WWII it was brought in again as a wartime measure and after that it was up to each jurisdiction to decide when and if to use it, resulting was a crazy patchwork. On a 35 mile bus trip from Ohio to West Virginia you’d have to change your watch seven times. Finally, it was standardized in 1966. Canada then followed suit to harmonize business, of course. Saskatchewan was then and still is the only holdout for consistent year round time.

Some interesting tidbits:

Draft Dodging Advantages A man, born just after 12 midnight, DST, circumvented the Vietnam War draft by using a daylight saving time loophole. When drafted, he argued that standard time, not DST, was the official time for recording births in his state of Delaware in the year of his birth. Thus, under official standard time he was actually born on the previous day—and that day had a much higher draft lottery number and allowed him to avoid the draft.

Accidental Suicide Bombers In September 1999, the Palestinian West Bank was on daylight saving time while Israel had just switched back to standard time. West Bank Palestinians prepared time bombs and smuggled them to Arab Israelis, who misunderstood the time on the bombs. As the bombs were being planted, they exploded—one hour too early—killing three terrorists instead of two busloads of people, the intended victims.

Side-effects Apparently, after we “fall back” an hour, depression and suicides increase (busy period for psychiatrists) and the home spun one hour jetlag messes up people’s sleep cycles, which is bad news for parents with newborns.

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