Welcome to Daylight Nonsense Time

At 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, most of North America celebrates a twice-yearly ritual: the seasonal change of clocks. From Florida to Alaska and from California to Nunavut, the vast majority of people will “fall back” an hour, ending Daylight Saving Time and restoring the pattern we call Standard Time.

In practice, this means that most people “gain” an hour of daylight in the morning and lose one in the evening. In Anchorage, Alaska, for example, a time zone west of Pacific Time, the sun currently rises just before 9:30 a.m. Sunrise there will now “fall back” to around 8:30 a.m. Next to Alaska, in the Yukon, where I understand we used to have this shift: When Anchorage went from 9:30 to 8:30, we went from 10:30 to 9:30

But in November 2020, the Yukon joined a handful of other holdouts and forewent the seasonal time change. However, we did it a little differently: Instead of switching completely to standard time like others, we switched to permanent daylight saving time. Essentially this means we now operate on Mountain Standard Time year round. On November 3rd, when Anchorage drops back to 8:30 a.m., it will still be 10:30 a.m. here in Whitehorse. Imagine putting Seattle and San Francisco in the same time zone as Denver or El Paso; Now we continue along almost the same route to the west. That's how far I am from Denver, but starting November 3rd I'll be there on Denver time.

And that just doesn't make sense to me. The 24-hour clock is certainly a human construct. But it is a construct based on the Earth's rotation relative to the Sun; It should reflect our days and nights. Instead, here in Whitehorse, despite being at the westernmost edge of the Pacific Time Zone, we now live in Mountain Time – almost two time zones out of sync for half a year. The period in which the sun shines is now concentrated at 2 or 3 p.m. instead of midday. This, and a quirk of geography that now places us exactly where three time zones meet, results in a wider temporal gap between us and our nearest neighbors than ever before – an absurdity that has spawned a popular local meme.

So how did this happen? Well, we should make this change together with British Columbia. BC, for its part, was keeping an eye on the change primarily because California, Oregon and Washington were also talking about it. But instead of doing the logical thing – returning to permanent standard time – BC announced its intention to make daylight saving time permanent in 2019, and the Yukon followed suit.

“Researchers in circadian rhythms and sleep around the world agree that we should not have permanent daylight saving time.”

In the end, everyone else on the West Coast stuck with the status quo, and we were the only ones who actually pulled the lever. Since then, I have complained about the decision to anyone who will listen.

It's not just that the extra hour of morning darkness in an already very long, very dark winter makes my life even more difficult. It's also physically and mentally unhealthy: A number of sleep researchers made this clear as BC considered the move. As one of them told CBC at the time, “Researchers in circadian rhythms and sleep around the world agree that we shouldn't have permanent daylight saving time.”

Daylight saving time was a wartime invention first introduced in the United States in 1918, repealed after the Armistice and revived for World War II. It was never actually about daylight; Instead, the aim was to minimize fuel costs for light and heat while maximizing worker productivity. Daylight saving time is just another way to put more pressure on all of us.

It is based on the global time zone system invented in Canada in the late 19th century by engineer and railway surveyor Sir Sandford Fleming. His system was intended to simplify relationships between communities, travel, and the westward movement of light through the sky. Before Fleming, North American timekeepers used a system called mean solar time, which was calculated locally and based on the position of the sun. This worked as long as no one could travel that far and that fast. But in the age of long-distance trains it became impractical. Suddenly it was too easy to get out of sync with the sun.

Enter Sir Sandford. He proposed a method that divided the world into 24 uniform disks, each about 15 degrees of longitude wide, roughly centered on the meridians running from pole to pole.

The zone we now call Mountain Standard Time was originally based on the meridian that bisects the province of Saskatchewan before running through easternmost Montana and Wyoming, marking Denver and passing east of El Paso before heading to Chihuahua, Mexico. Under Fleming's system, Mountain Standard Time should have included everything from west of Phoenix to about San Antonio, Texas; As originally thought, the Mountain Period might better have been called “East of the Rockies Period.”

Over the years, of course, we have adjusted our imaginary time zones to fit more easily with our equally imaginary geographical boundaries. Time zones are now often based on provincial and state borders, meaning that all of Montana and most of Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona (which has its own time zone mess) are located, although technically they are too far west of the original defining meridians are included in Mountain Time.

And the Yukon? Well, here in Whitehorse I sit more than 30 degrees west of the original meridian that marks the time zone in which I now live. The system, originally intended to bring order to the time display, instead means that solar noon and the noon that clocks indicate are no longer in close proximity to one another. For my part, I think it's high time we left this increasingly surreal distortion of our solar reality behind us. It is the right time for year-round standard time.