Colby Cosh,

Alberta’s flirtation with the destruction of daylight saving met with an ignominious end on Tuesday. Bill 203, dubbed the Alberta Standard Time Act, had been sent to the Standing Committee on Alberta’s Economic Future in the spring, after the Notley government concluded that a lot of grouchy Albertans want to stop changing their clocks twice a year. The committee arranged public hearings in four cities. Only 113 people showed up. Thirty- three of them spoke in favour of the bill. Sixty-nine were opposed.

Politically, it s eemed the whole controversy had turned out to be what the Alberta oil patch would call a “dry hole.” The committee arranged for Bill 203 to die, although it added to its concluding motion some hopeful post-mortem language about “engage other jurisdictions ... to discuss a co- ordinated approach to eliminating the practice of observing daylight saving time.”

What exactly happened here? It seems, in part, to be another lesson in exploiting the desire for political change. Remember when the federal Liberals promised to end first- past- the- post elections, and found that this was a heck of a popular idea — but that the people who agreed with them were split almost equally over irreconcilable replacements for the procedure they hated?

The outcome of Alberta’s public consultations on daylight saving seems to have been pretty much exactly like that. ( At least, that is going to be my excuse for writing about Alberta clocks again. This stupid controversy actually conceals an important political theme!) Bill 203 would not technically have ended daylight saving in the province — it would have made it permanent. It proffered a “spring forward” without a corresponding falling back, putting the province forever on the same clock as most of neighbouring Saskatchewan. (The area around the border city of Lloydminster — what Saskatchewan law calls the Battle River Time Option Area — stays in step with Alberta’s current clocks, observing Mountain Time plus daylight saving.)

But many daylight saving haters wanted Alberta to go the other way — to stay one hour behind Saskatchewan year-round. ( This would prevent Alberta from being two hours ahead of most of neighbouring British Columbia for part of each year.) This could explain why a majority seems to dislike the twice- yearly changing of the clocks, but two-thirds of the witnesses at the public hearings opposed the bill. Some of the opponents like the status quo; some think the bill’s revolutionary intentions are excellent, but pointed 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

This is not just my take on the Alberta Standard Time Act, although I spotted the divide among the daylight saving killers very early in the process. (Perhaps I was influenced by the federal electionreform example.) One committee member, Lethbridge New Democrat MLA Maria Fitzpatrick, told the committee Tuesday that this was exactly what had happened: she i nitially heard from throngs of people who were in a frenzy to stop changing clocks, but when the committee started talking to citizens, “It was one-third, one-third, and one-third.”

This kind of situation is a known recipe for trouble. In 2011, Russia did exactly what Bill 203 would have done in Alberta, springing forward and staying there without falling back in the autumn. After one winter, everybody agreed that this had been a horrendous mistake, and the country fell back for good in October 2014.

My personal preference in the Alberta time debate is to keep our clocks in sync with those of my oppressive, impatient bosses in Toronto. It is convenient for me to be a steady two hours behind the bastards year- round. But as someone who has developed a late-life computer programming avocation, I am also aware that Russia’s indecision is a permanent problem for computer operating systems and data time series.

From the standpoint of the ordinary Russian, the great time mistake of 2011 may have been fixed. But computers have to account retroactively for both the misstep and the reversal until the end of time itself. Russian indecision added a tiny sliver of complexity to time zone accounting everywhere, in the entire world.

Once you have learned to sense the dimensions of such a horror, you cannot help wincing at any talk of messing around with time zones. ( Small regions adjacent to Alberta, on both the east and west sides, would have to decide whether to adjust along with the province: this would multiply the externalized inconvenience.) The preference for not fixing what ain’t broke is, in turn, why some businesses (notably Albertabased WestJet and the two Alberta NHL teams) protested Bill 203.

The committee that was assigned to look at the bill is an economic committee, as its name suggests. And as its members affirmed on Tuesday, nobody has much idea what the full economic effects of a time-zone change might be. Some extra deference probably has to be given to important Alberta businesses.

There is evidence that from an energy efficiency standpoint, daylight saving is literally a waste of time for this province. But if we cannot act alone for other economic reasons, that may not matter much. The ordinarily ultra- green New Democrats still have not shown the slightest interest in the environmental evidence, anyway. The time debate seems to be pure populism. And, as populism often does, it has hit a rut.