Alberta’s premier consulting on scrapping clock changes, prefers more light at night

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her government will consult on doing away with twice-a-year clock changes.

And she says if a switch is made, she would prefer going to permanent daylight time.

Smith says she believes if you asked people if they want to stop changing their clocks, the question would likely get overwhelming support.

“We are on daylight eight months of the year, so going to standard 12 months of the year would be a big adjustment for people,” Smith said on Thursday.

Smith says she likes more sunlight at night and believes most others do, too.

Her comments come as British Columbians prepare to spring their timepieces forward this Sunday for one final time as that province adopts year-round daylight time.

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Smith has said with 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, but it 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.

But since then, areas surrounding the province have made changes.

Yukon moved their clocks ahead for the last time, switching to permanent daylight saving time following a wildly popular public consultation. B.C is following suit.

Smith said she’s recently talked to the premier of Northwest Territories and there’s support to ditch the switch there as well.

“It could just be that Alberta was a little early in asking that question, so we’ll be doing some consultation now to see is now is the time for us to consider it,” she said at an unrelated announcement in Cochrane Thursday.

According to the Pew Research Center, only about a third of the world’s countries follow daylight saving time. The vast majority of them are in Europe.

In Canada, Saskatchewan was the lone daylight saving time holdout, with only a few border communities making the seasonal change.

— With files from Karen Bartko and Amy Judd, Global News