Premier Danielle Smith says with neighboring provinces to the west moving to adopt year-round daylight saving time, it’s time once again for Alberta to consider abandoning the practice of changing clocks twice a year.
Premier David Eby announced on Monday that British Columbia would move forward one hour for the final time on Sunday, in an effort to make life easier.
This means the region will be aligned with Alberta from November to March, and Alberta will be in sync with Saskatchewan from March to November.
In Canada, Saskatchewan is the only place that does not have daylight saving time, and only a few border communities practice changing seasons.
Smith said along with the mostly year-round use of central standard time in Saskatchewan, B.C.’s shift raises questions about whether Alberta should strive for consistency across the western provinces.
Nearly five years ago, a referendum question was put to Albertans to keep daylight saving time year-round: permanently turning the clocks to daylight saving time and no longer turning them forward in March and back in November.
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The question, put to voters in the 2021 municipal elections, failed by a very small margin – 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent.
Despite the results of a public survey released by the Alberta government in the spring of 2020, 91 per cent of the 141,000 Albertans polled said they wanted to stop changing their clocks twice a year and stick with DST.
Smith had previously considered putting the issue to a vote and has now said his Conservative Party will consider it again.
“Our government will consider these recent developments and evaluate whether similar changes would best benefit Albertans,” he said in a statement on Monday.
Alberta has been in daylight since 1971.
The previous NDP government planned to eliminate daylight saving time in 2017, but did not proceed due to concerns about the impact on flight schedules and the start times of NHL games.
As for this year, the clocks “move forward” when daylight saving time begins this Sunday at 2 am
— With files from Wolfgang Depner, The Canadian Press and Karen Bartko, Global News
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