Daylight saving time ends tonight: Why the clocks fall back one hour

At 2 a.m. on Sunday Nov. 2, daylight saving time (DST) will end and clocks will “fall back” one hour for most Canadians, forcing people to adjust their sleep schedules.

In Canada, DST always starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.

DST is practiced in over 70 countries and by an estimated one billion people globally, but how did Canada come to participate in this peculiar routine, and why do some provinces just not bother? What are the potential benefits and downsides? Here’s everything you need to know about daylight saving time ahead of another clock shift this weekend.

DST has surprisingly Canadian origins, which can be traced back to the industrial revolution. The first municipality in the world to implement daylight saving time was Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ont., in 1908, ostensibly because a local business magnate, John Hewitson, wanted more daylight for recreation in the summertime. The idea was proposed in various forms throughout the late 19th century, most notably by New Zealand astronomer and entomologist George Vernon Hudson, who suggested changing the time as a way to have more daylight hours for his bug-catching hobby.

But the widespread adoption of daylight saving time came during the First World War. In 1916, Germany became the first country to institute DST as a way to have more daylight during waking hours and to conserve coal for the war effort. Other countries, notably the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, followed suit, but DST ended when the war did. The practice was brought back during the Second World War.

After the wars, the federal law that mandated DST across the country lapsed and fell into the hands of provincial and local governments. While most parts of Canada stuck with the practice, some provinces, most notably Saskatchewan in 1966, ditched the system over time.

Saskatchewan stays on Central Standard Time all year, except for Lloydminster, a city that is in both Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Yukon decided to stay on daylight time year-round in 2020, which is now known as Yukon Time.

Southampton Island, in Nunavut, stays on Eastern Standard Time all year, but the rest of the territory changes its clocks twice a year.

Other provinces have expressed a desire to abolish DST, but only if the U.S. agrees, including Ontario, Manitoba and B.C., where some places have already gotten rid of the practice. Atlantic premiers have said they would follow if others abolished the clock change.

Alberta narrowly (50.2 per cent) voted to continue DST in a referendum held on Oct. 18, 2021.

Research shows that something as simple as switching the clocks may have some serious effects on cognitive health. John Anderson is an assistant professor in the departments of cognitive science and psychology at Carleton University. Anderson said one of the main concerns is how the system throws off our sleep schedules.

“You’ve probably got a sense of when your ‘best’ time of day is, the time when you can really hone in and focus and do your best work or exercise at your peak,” Anderson said. “When you mess with your circadian rhythm, that internal clock, it is very bad for people.”

Anderson said the research behind the DST switch increasingly shows the potential dangers this can have on our bodies, a phenomenon known as “social jet lag.”

“Artificially changing when you wake up throws off all the internal clocks in your body and can spike stress hormones, like cortisol, which can lead to impaired memory function,” Anderson said. “In addition to memory impairments, there are also changes in levels of alertness that can be dangerous. For example, there are way more car crashes after daylight saving time, and these likely reflect lapses in attention and sleep deprivation that come when we change the clock.”

Anderson added that these effects can often persist long-term and lead to other complications. “When your clock starts to become misaligned, it can cause a wide range of symptoms including brain fog, digestive issues, heart issues, and spike your risk for inflammatory disease including diabetes, heart attack, and cancer,” he said.

Even since its inception, the time switch has been controversial. Most of us aren’t bug-catchers, and the western world no longer runs primarily on coal. Is it time to stop fiddling with our clocks twice a year?

Recently, Liberal Member of Parliament Marie-France Lalonde proposed a private members’ bill that would eliminate the bi-annual time-switch entirely.

U.S. President Donald Trump also isn’t a fan of the practice.

“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate daylight saving time,” Trump has said on Truth Social last December, calling it “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

However, he has since said it’s hard to get consensus around the issue. And people can’t agree whether to keep the clocks as they are in the fall or the spring.

“This should be the easiest one of all, but it’s a 50-50 issue. If something’s a 50-50 issue, it’s hard to get excited. I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier, because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark,” Trump said in March, according to Reuters. “A lot of people like it one way, a lot of people like it the other way, it’s very even. And usually I find when that’s the case — what else do we have to?”

Anderson also thinks it may be time to stop changing the clocks.

“The world we live in right now is so hard on sleep and biological rhythms, from the lights we get exposed to at night, to the schedules we keep,” Anderson said. “I think anything we can do to avoid further disruptions to the circadian rhythm is a good thing. The disruption may be short-lived, but it is noticeable.”

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