It’s time to abolish Daylight Savings

Daylight savings time exists in all six of Canada’s time zones. Only four spots in the country have freed themselves from the responsibility of changing their clocks by an hour twice every year.

(Those spots are: the eastern tip of Quebec, Nunavut’s Southampton Island, all of Saskatchewan except Lloydminster, and a section of northeastern BC.)

Other notable places that have abolished daylight savings might include: India, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, China, South Korea, Japan, most of Arizona, most of Australia, sections of Mexico, and most of Brazil. Don’t worry, they were all fine without it.

Daylight savings is known to cause a spike in car accidents in the week following each clock change. Some Muslim-majority countries actually change their clocks four times instead of two, switching back to wintertime for the month of Ramadan before going back to summertime.

Back in the day, daylight savings was used to help offset the fluctuation in the number of daylight hours. It reduces the total range of sunrise times throughout the year by one hour. For example, take a look at the graph of Toronto’s average sunrise and sunset times throughout the year.

In modern times, many of the benefits that daylight savings proponents used to tout simply do not exist anymore, as daylight continues to have less and less influence on our activities. If anything, daylight savings increases the risk of heart attacks, inconveniences those who follow a religion with sun-based prayer times, and screws up farmers’ schedules twice yearly.

Beyond that, just consider the number of total manhours wasted each year on the unnecessary exercise of clock-setting. To make matters even worse, daylight savings has actually been shown to increase total energy consumption, even if there is a smaller decrease in electricity consumption.

A slight tweaking of relative electricity prices between off-peak and on-peak hours is likely to have more of an effect on electricity consumption than the negligible effect by daylight savings anyway.

The single biggest downside of abolishing daylight savings might be the fact that it would desynchronize Canada’s pacific, mountain, central, and eastern time zones from the Americans’. The solution is to convince them to abolish it as well.

Given President Trump’s feelings on the matter, it may happen sooner than you think!

Trump came out against daylight savings earlier today saying that making time “permanent” was OK with him.