At 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, most of North America will observe a twice-yearly ritual: the seasonal changing of the clocks. From Florida to Alaska and from California to Nunavut, the vast majority of people will “fall backward” by one hour, ending Daylight Saving Time and re-establishing the pattern that we call Standard Time.
In practical terms, this means that most people will “gain” an hour of daylight in the morning and lose one in the evening. In Anchorage, Alaska, for example, one time zone west of Pacific Time, the sun currently rises just before 9:30 a.m. Sunrise there will now “fall back” to around 8:30 a.m. Next door to Alaska, in the Yukon, where I live, we used to match that shift: When Anchorage went from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30, we shifted from 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.
But in November 2020, the Yukon joined a handful of other holdouts in eschewing the seasonal time change. We did it a little differently, however: Instead of moving entirely to Standard Time, as others have done, we switched to permanent Daylight Saving Time. In essence, that means we now operate year-round on Mountain Standard Time, so on Nov. 3, when Anchorage falls back to 8:30 a.m., it will still be 10:30 a.m. here in Whitehorse. Imagine lumping Seattle and San Francisco into the same time zone as Denver or El Paso; now go almost the same distance further west again. That’s how far I am from Denver, but come Nov. 3 I’ll be on Denver time.
And that just doesn’t make sense to me. The 24-hour clock is a human construct, sure. But it’s a construct based on the rotation of the Earth in relation to the sun; it’s supposed to reflect our days and nights. Instead, here in Whitehorse, despite being on the westernmost edge of the Pacific Time Zone, we’re now living on Mountain Time — almost two time zones out of sync for half the year. The period of time when the sun is out is now centered on 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. instead of noon. That, plus a quirk of geography that now places us right where three time zones meet, creates a wider-than-ever temporal gap between us and our closest neighbors, an absurdity that has spawned a popular local meme.
So how did this happen? Well, we were supposed to make this shift along with British Columbia. B.C. in turn was eyeing the change largely because California, Oregon, and Washington were all talking about it, too. But instead of doing the logical thing — reverting to permanent Standard Time —in 2019 B.C. announced an intention to make Daylight Saving Time permanent, and the Yukon matched those plans.
“Researchers in circadian rhythms and sleep unanimously all over the world agree on this, that we should not have permanent daylight saving time.”
In the end, everyone else on the West Coast stuck with the status quo, and we were the only ones to actually pull the lever. I’ve been complaining about the decision, to anyone who will listen, ever since.
It’s not just that the extra hour of morning darkness, in an already very long, very dark winter, makes my life that much harder. It’s also physically and mentally unhealthy: A bunch of sleep scientists made that clear back when B.C. was considering the move. As one of them told the CBC at the time: “Researchers in circadian rhythms and sleep unanimously all over the world agree on this, that we should not have permanent daylight saving time.”
Daylight Saving was a wartime invention, first launched in the United States in 1918, set aside after the Armistice and revived for World War II. It was never about daylight, exactly; instead, it was supposed to minimize the cost of fuel for light and heat while maximizing worker productivity. Daylight Saving Time is just another way to squeeze us all that much harder.
It relies on the global system of time zones invented in Canada in the late 1800s by engineer and railway surveyor Sir Sandford Fleming. His system was supposed to uncomplicate the relationships between communities, travel and the westward movement of light through the sky. Before Fleming, North American timekeepers used a system known as mean solar time, calculated locally and based on the position of the sun. This worked as long as nobody could travel all that far, all that quickly. But it became impractical in the age of long-distance rail. Suddenly, it was too easy to fall out of sync with the sun.
Enter Sir Sandford. He proposed a method that divided the world into 24 even slices, each roughly 15 degrees of longitude wide, roughly centered on the meridians that run from pole to pole.
The zone we now call Mountain Standard Time was originally based on the meridian that splits the province of Saskatchewan down the middle before diving through easternmost Montana and Wyoming, tagging Denver and passing east of El Paso before entering Chihuahua, Mexico. According to Fleming’s system, Mountain Standard Time should have encompassed everything from just west of Phoenix to around about San Antonio, Texas; as originally envisioned, Mountain Time might better have been called East-of-the-Rockies Time.
Over the years, of course, we’ve adjusted our imaginary time zones so that they mesh more easily with our equally imaginary geographical boundaries. Time zones now often align with provincial and state borders, meaning that all of Montana and most of Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona (which has its own time zone mess), though technically located too far west of that original defining meridian, are included in Mountain Time.
And the Yukon? Well, here in Whitehorse I’m sitting more than 30 degrees west of the original meridian denoting the time zone I now live under. The system that was originally designed to bring some order to the telling of time instead means that solar noon and the noon the clocks offer are no longer within spitting distance of each other. I, for one, think it’s past time we ditched this increasingly surreal distortion of our solar reality. The time is right for year-round Standard Time.
