COLUMN: Think Again – Ending time change a welcome move

There’s an old saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It’s a good way to describe Premier Wab Kinew’s recent announcement that his government is ending seasonal time changes in Manitoba. From this point on, Manitoba will remain on Central Daylight Time all year long.

Let’s give credit where it is due. The premier got it right when he announced that Manitobans will no longer turn their clocks back an hour this November. In fact, it should have been an easy decision.

Opinion polls show that the vast majority of Manitobans were ready to end the practice of switching their clocks twice a year. This issue was brought to the fore when British Columbia and Alberta recently announced that their residents would no longer have to switch their clocks. Saskatchewan, of course, had never participated in the time change.

With all our western neighbours ditching the twice-annual time change, it made little sense for Manitoba to continue with this antiquated practice. Plus, there’s plenty of evidence that switching our clocks was stressful and led to a loss of sleep. Now we will just keep the same time all year round.

The more difficult decision was whether to make daylight savings time permanent or keep Manitoba on standard time all year. Arguments for daylight savings time include extra hours of daylight in summer evenings and the fact that we are already on daylight savings time for seven months of the year.

Proponents of standard time argue that extending daylight savings time all year will mean that sunrise arrives after 9 am in December. This means that children will go to school when it’s still completely dark. They also point out that standard time is the best fit for natural human sleep cycles.

In the end, polls showed that most Manitobans prefer daylight savings time, so that is the option the premier chose. It’s a reasonable choice, particularly since the premier had promised to listen to the wishes of Manitobans on this issue. Since most Manitobans were tired of changing their clocks and preferred daylight savings time, it made sense to put us on permanent daylight time all year.

This puts us in sync with our western neighbours since we will now always be one hour ahead of Saskatchewan and Alberta and two hours ahead of British Columbia. Businesses benefit because they will no longer face the problem of not being certain what time it is in other provinces.

It’s only a matter of time (no pun intended) before other provinces follow suit. Municipalities in northwestern Ontario are also exploring the possibility of ending seasonal time changes so that they remain in sync with Manitoba. For the sake of simplicity, it would be best if Ontario Premier Doug Ford did the same for his entire province.

However, while Premier Kinew got this decision right, he cannot take exclusive credit. Shortly before the 2023 election, the previous PC government passed legislation to end seasonal time changes. Because it was never proclaimed by the NDP government after the election, the legislation never took effect.

More recently, Springfield-Ritchot MLA Ron Schuler introduced a private members bill that proposed to put Manitoba on permanent daylight time. Initially, the NDP government refused to support it, which meant it didn’t go anywhere. It was only after Manitobans made it clear that they wanted Manitoba to end seasonal changes that the premier came around to this position.

Regardless of how we got here, this is still a decision worth celebrating. It’s about time (again, no pun intended) that our province got rid of seasonal time changes.

Michael Zwaagstra is a teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.