DST like Groundhog Day

Feeling well-rested from an extra hour of sleep, British Columbians may not be bothered that much today by the fact their clocks are still falling back an hour in November and springing forward an hour in March as part of a Daylight Saving Time calendar that no one much likes and which the NDP government promised to make permanent five years ago.

But come March, when they lose a precious hour of sleep, and suffer from clock-induced jet lag for the next few days, they may be inclined to take to social media and ask: “Why are we still doing this?”

Promises to permanently fix Daylight Saving Time have become a bit like the movie Groundhog Day.

In 2019, the NDP government under John Horgan promised to place B.C. permanently under Daylight Saving Time, and introduced legislation to move B.C. permanently to Pacific Time.

The legislation has been stalled ever since, however, because B.C. is waiting for similar legislation in California, Oregon and Washington to pass, and those states are waiting for U.S. Congress to approve the changes. And American Congress is just too politically polarized to get anything done – even things that are have wide public support.

“Congress is dysfunctional, so they can never see eye-to-eye on anything – even something trivial as Daylight Saving Time," said Werner Antweiler, associate professor at the University of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business. "It's just not high on the agenda for anyone."

Donald Trump has, in the past, supported the idea of moving permanently to Daylight Saving Time (“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!”, he tweeted in 2019, according to Politico), but even if he were elected president, the Sunshine Protection Act, passed by the Senate in 2022, could not be passed by executive order. It still needs congressional passage.

So, despite wide public support for making Daylight Saving Time permanent in Canada and the U.S., people are stuck with the biannual clock changes.

The B.C. government could go it alone, but both John Horgan and David Eby have said they want B.C.'s time zone harmonized with Washington and California, because so much business and trade goes on between the Pacific states and province.

"There are sound arguments because there is a lot of commerce and travel that's happening north-south," Antweiler said. "So the U.S. is a key partner here. Once we mess around with the time zones, it adds another layer of complexity for various operations. Whether you're trading electricity or something, it does create economic friction."

Daylight saving was originally introduced in North America during the First World War as an energy saving measure. With a working day having one extra hour of sunlight in the summer, it was thought that it would save on electricity use, as people would not need to keep the lights on so long in the evenings.

Some studies suggest there are still energy savings to be had from it, while others say it’s a wash.

The biggest problem with it, from an economic standpoint, is impacts on health and productivity.

Writing for the C.D. Howe Institute in 2017, public policy academics Nic Rivers and Blake Shaffer wrote about the pros and cons of daylight savings time.

Rivers conducted a study in 2016 that concluded daylight saving did, in fact, result in 1.5 per cent more demand for electricity in Ontario.

Shaffer, meanwhile, did a study in Alberta that found electricity demand in Alberta also increased by 1.6 per cent “during the periods of spring and fall transition,” but fell by one per cent overall across the entire time period.

Antweiler, who specializes in energy economics, believes there is no energy benefits at all to Daylight Saving Time.

“We now use much more efficient lighting, and so lighting is no longer a major source of electricity use,” he said. “So energy savings? Nope – just not happening.”

The most compelling argument against changing the clocks twice a year is that it plays havoc with peoples’ circadian rhythms.

Rivers and Shaffer pointed to one study that suggested changing sleep patterns led to a six-per-cent increase in fatal accidents.

Another study found an increase in the incidence of heart attacks associated with the circadian disruptions from moving clocks forward one hour every spring.

“These transitions can disrupt chronobiologic rhythms and influence the duration and quality of sleep, and the effect lasts for several days after the shifts,” Imre Janszky and Rickard Ljung wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2008.

Janszky and Ljung studied the incidence of acute myocardial infarction (heart attacks) and found it was “significantly increased for the first three weekdays after the transition to Daylight Saving Time in the spring.”

Antweiler added there is also evidence that time changes have a negative impact on investment traders and, therefore, stock markets.

Though it appears not to have been studied, if there is one business that benefits from the yearly clock changes each spring, it's probably Starbucks.