Premier Danielle Smith says with the province’s neighbours to the west moving to adopt year-round daylight time, it’s once again time for Alberta to consider abandoning the practice of changing clocks twice a year.
Premier David Eby announced Monday British Columbia will spring forward an hour for the final time Sunday, in an effort to make life easier.
That means it will be in lock-step with Alberta from November to March, and Alberta will sync with Saskatchewan from March to November.
In Canada, Saskatchewan is the lone daylight saving time holdout, with only a few border communities making the seasonal change.
Smith said along with most of Saskatchewan’s use of year-round central standard time, B.C.’s shift raises questions about whether Alberta should aim for consistency across the western provinces.
Almost five years ago, a referendum question was put to Albertans to keep daylight time year-round: permanently changing to summer hours and no longer turning clocks forward in March and backward in November.
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The question, put to voters in the 2021 municipal election, failed by the narrowest of margins — 50.2 per cent to 49.8 per cent.
That, despite the results of a public survey released by the Alberta government in the spring of 2020, in 91 per cent of the 141,000 Albertans who weighed in said they’d like to stop changing their clocks twice a year and stick with DST.
Smith has previously mused about putting the issue on a ballot and now says her United Conservatives will take another look.
“Our government will take these recent developments under consideration and evaluate whether a similar change would be in the best interest of Albertans,” she said in a statement Monday.
Alberta has been on daylight time since 1971.
The former NDP government explored doing away with daylight time in 2017, but did not go ahead in part over concerns about the impact on airline schedules and starting times for NHL games.
As for this year, clocks “spring ahead” when daylight saving time begins this Sunday at 2 a.m.
— With files from Wolfgang Depner, The Canadian Press and Karen Bartko, Global News
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