Daylight saving in Alberta: my part in its downfall

You ever have one of those “Uh oh, what did I just do” moments? I guess the advent of the personal computer has made us all a lot more familiar with that feeling. In the old days, you had to leave a tractor in gear on a hill or something to induce it. I had it this week when I found out I might have helped to destroy daylight saving time in Alberta.

As a Greater Siberia correspondent for the National Post, my life is anchored to deadlines set in Toronto: it has been thus for more than a decade. Since I don’t commute, I don’t pay much attention to local clocks for any other reason. The amount of sunlight I get does not depend on them. Sometimes I need to hustle when the grocery store nearest to my food desert is close to closing: mostly I don’t care. For me, daylight saving serves the function of keeping Alberta clocks in sync with Ontario ones, with a constant year-round difference of two hours.

But for Albertan commuters and parents of schoolchildren, there has always been a bit of resentment at the existence of daylight saving. There is a heritage of complaint, hitherto taking the form of radio talk-show discussions and the odd private member’s bill. In the fall, the NDP government, sensing a chance to harvest populist fruit, put a backbencher on the file and announced public consultations.

MLA Thomas Dang talked a lot about daylight saving being a relic of 20th-century war austerity. He did not talk about whether daylight saving does what it is designed to do: save energy. This seemed extraordinary to me, since our government is otherwise preoccupied with energysaving to the point of obsession. It was somewhat understandable, however, because the scholarly evidence about whether daylight saving does what it claims to has never been strong. Individual studies from different places and times contradict one another.

In December, just as Dang was inviting the Alberta public to gripe to him about daylight saving, a University of Ottawa economist, Nic Rivers, came out with new, high-quality Canadian evidence about the effect of daylight saving on Ontario’s energy consumption.

In Canada, energy demand is measured hour-to-hour by centralized grid operators and, for the most part, reported publicly. We also have years of good outdoor temperature measurements, kept in tidy electronic tables that scientists and statisticians don’t have to beg or pay for. my work: “He’s right.” Shaffer has repeated Rivers’s effort in the Alberta setting, and has extended it by making interprovincial comparisons that Rivers didn’t.

What he found, of course, was exactly the opposite of what I had guessed and had led readers to expect. I had left the tractor in gear.

In Alberta, whose population is spread out over wider latitudes than other Canadian provinces, the “spring forward” shift that daylight saving imposes leaves citizens waking up in the cold and dark, consuming more electricity than they would if the clocks were left alone. Patio-goers in Alberta’s cities like the long Russian-style evenings of sunlit booze-sipping that springing forward facilitates in the summer. But many workers and parents dislike the loss of morning sunshine in late spring and early autumn.

Almost everyone agrees that we can do away with changing the clocks, but there seem to be roughly equal-sized camps in favour of leaving the time permanently one way (unadjusted mountain time) or the other (mountain standard plus one hour). This seems like a potential can of worms, though a small one, for the Alberta government. If one assumes that I am not the only Albertan who finds the status quo convenient — and I bet financial traders and computer coders will fight for it — the NDP may have done no more than to create an opportunity to disappoint twothirds of the voting public.

Creating a two-hour time difference with neighbouring B.C. for parts of the year, if we go that way, might be awkward, particularly for the Rocky Mountain economy and lifestyle. Communities in “Greater Alberta,” on either side of the province’s legal borders, would have awkward choices.

Yet daylight saving seems all but impossible to defend if it wastes electricity: there is now a firm environmental rationale for change. So much misery and confusion, and I am partly to blame by setting out bait for those damned economists. I ought to have known better.