THE DAYLIGHT DEBATE
Daylight saving time pioneer opposes move to scrap twice-yearly clock shift
Bill Creighton, pictured near his home in Calgary earlier this month, became an accidental champion for daylight saving time in Alberta in the 1960s. He still believes that springing forward and falling back are in the best interests of Albertans, and he opposes the suggestion that the province would be better off scrapping the custom.
Nearly 50 years ago, two men joined forces to bring sunshine late into the Alberta evening.
Bill Creighton and David Matthews, two Calgary sports enthusiasts, battled cautious politicians, drive-in theatre owners and even the Edmonton Journal’s editorial board to bring daylight saving time to the province.
Now, they’re watching with incredulity as an NDP backbencher takes legislative aim at the daylight hours they worked so hard to get.
Thomas Dang, MLA for Edmon- ton-South West, is looking for input into a potential private member’s bill that would abolish daylight time. That means either switching to central time, to be aligned with Saskatchewan, or staying on mountain time year-round.
Central time would let summer light continue long into the evening, but would mean darker mornings in the winter. Mountain time means summer days would see more light in the morning but less in the evening.
The big benefit? No more groggy March mornings like Sunday, March 12, when the clocks jump forward and deprive us of an hour of sleep.
Dang said the downsides of switching to daylight time are clear: young children have trouble adjusting, it may lead to an increase in heart attacks, and farmers and ranchers say it interferes with milking and feeding schedules.
Creighton and Matthews are not convinced, and their annoyance at the NDP MLA — who Matthews referred to as “this Dang guy” in an interview with the Journal — is obvious.
With a sprawling complex of soccer fields behind his house, Creigh- ton doesn’t have to go far to see the benefits of daylight time. He watches soccer players sprinting up and down the fields late into the evening. Abolishing the time change would take hundreds of hours of practice time away from them, he said.
“Once you get to the middle of August it starts to get dark early pretty fast,” said Creighton.
The battle has been raging for more than a hundred years, all over the world. The letters to the editor from 1967 bear a striking resemblance to those written in 2017 and are just as passionate.
Even Creighton and Matthews have fought this fight twice before. The first plebiscite in Alberta was defeated by such a slim margin in 1967 that the two men agreed to keep fighting for another one.
In the beginning, the daylight time lobby was just Creighton ranting about the scheme to a Calgary Herald sports reporter.
The next day, Creighton came home to his inquisitive wife.
“What have you done?” she asked. “You’ve had a hundred phone calls.”
Creighton’s name and phone number had appeared in a column in the Herald touting him as the leader of a new campaign for daylight saving time. It was news to him, but why not?
“So away we went,” he said.
A WIN FOR DAYLIGHT
Creighton said a consortium of vested interests — mainly drivein theatre owners who worried an extra hour of daylight would hurt their bottom line — spent about $20,000 opposing daylight time in 1967. That’s about $150,000 in today’s terms and it paid for fullpage ads in the city’s daily newspapers urging people to vote for the status quo.
Drive-intheatreownerNormMcDonald wrote a long piece for the Journal arguing that daylight time was an “almost ludicrous fantasy of turning night into day” brought about by “rabid golfing enthusiasts.” McDonald argued that Edmonton was so far north, and geographically should be in the Pacific time zone anyway, that it already got more than enough sunshine. The wellfunded campaign worked.
Creighton and Matthews lost, barely, with the “no” vote getting 51 per cent. The Journal had editorialized solidly in favour of the status quo and one reader wrote a letter after the plebiscite blaming the newspaper for swinging the vote away from daylight time.
Another reader wrote in September of 1967 to ask “no” voters if they were having second thoughts as the nights were drawing in.
Maybe they were, because the tide was turning for daylight time.
Creighton and Matthews kept the campaign going and, to their surprise, the drive-in folks barely showed up to the fight the second time. The drive-in industry in Alberta boomed in the ’60s, but started to plateau in the early ’70s. Maybe they saw a lost cause in fight- ing the plebiscite or maybe they had bigger problems on their plate.
The 1971 provincial election kicked off the 43-year Progressive Conservative dynasty but Albertans made another decision that outlasted the longest-serving Canadian government. With 61 per cent of the vote, they demanded an extra hour of evening sunshine.
The stars aligned for the daylight campaign, literally. The sun set at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 30, 1971, so anyone voting on the way home from work saw the sun plummeting to the horizon. McDonald, the theatre owner, had argued that “bright twilight” — when the sun has set but a dwindling light still provides some illumination — should be enough for most people to garden and play sports.
Albertans, apparently, disagreed.
IT BEATS CANNON FIRE
Despite the emphatic plebiscite win, the debate still rages, as it has since time zones were standardized and towns stopped using their own local time. We have North American railroads to thank for that innovation, but the daylight time issue has popped up randomly, fronted by single-minded, quixotic campaigners.
In fact, the history of daylight time goes back as far as window shutters.
When Benjamin Franklin lived in France he noticed many people slept long past sunrise by blocking out the bright light that streamed in each morning. Frugally minded, as ever, Franklin figured the city could save millions on candles if people went to bed a little earlier and woke up with the sun, David Prerau writes in Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time.
Franklin fired off — naturally — a letter to the editor recommending quotas on candles and taxes on window shutters. He even proposed cannon fire in the mornings “to wake the sluggards effectively, and make them open their eyes to their true interest.”
Daylight time never gained legislative steam until the early 1900s, when a pamphlet by an energetic Englishman named William Willett caused a sensation.
Willett was in the mould of Matthews and Creighton — a man who enjoyed sunshine and wanted everyone else to enjoy it, too.
From the beginning, farmers opposed the plan. They argued workers, with fewer morning daylight hours, wasted an hour or two waiting for dew to dry and then went home before the sun set.
Modern farmers have kept up the fight. Thomas Dang’s initial news release about the new attempt to scrap daylight time had comments from an egg farmer complaining that it “plays havoc with the natural rhythm of poultry.”
Willett’s plan failed until after his death. By then, the First World War was in full swing and the warring countries were looking for a way to save fuel.
Germany shifted its clocks, and England followed, with Canada adjusting to daylight time in 1918, until the end of the war. In 1942, all North America switched to daylight time to save electricity in factories providing war materials.
In Edmonton, city-dwellers enjoyed the extra hour of sunlight so much they rallied to keep it after the war.
In 1947, Mayor Harry Ainlay went rogue and declared daylight time in the city after a 1946 plebiscite. The only problem? The city charter didn’t give him that power.
After a debate in the legislature — carried out by many MLAs who now found themselves going home to ridings in a different time zone than the province’s capital — the Social Credit government kiboshed Edmonton’s extra daylight and made daylight time illegal across the province.
The boiling debate settled to a simmer until Creighton and Matthews came along.
At a press conference last month, Dang, the MLA behind the plan to scrap daylight time, insisted he was still looking into all the options.
Creighton and Matthews both grudgingly accept that switching to central time could be a good compromise. But they can’t understand why losing or gaining an hour is such a big deal.
“There were 15.7 million people who went through the Calgary airport last year. Think how many clocks and time changes that would be on the human body,” said Creighton.
That’s the crux of an issue that’s caused a hundred years of debate. It’s one hour in a year with nearly 9,000 of them. A bit of grogginess one morning and an extra hour of sleep another.
So what drives the furious debate?
Time, along with weather, is a staple of small talk. Get in an elevator with someone and it’s “five o’clock already” or “sunny day out there.” These are two things that affect us constantly and that we can’t control.
The daylight time debate allows us to feel like we’re exerting some influence on the interminable march of time which, inevitably, will carry on without us.
Or maybe it’s something more simple. For Bill Creighton, he just wants to see soccer players outside his house, sprinting down the field late into the August evening.
“There must be some benefit to it or it wouldn’t have lasted in North America for 70-plus years,” he said.