It has always rankled that in order to conduct business with their own federal government, Victorians have to phone Ottawa before lunch.
The three-hour time difference pretty much leaves a morning workday window to function as fully fledged Canadians. By early afternoon our time, the Back East bureaucrats turn out the lights and go home.
Hardly chafes at all when you’re munching on a sandwich and someone in Ontario says, “Don’t think I can get you an answer today — it’s 4 o’clock here in Cana....” Oops.
True story. Insert simmering resentment here.
Actually, you need not even leave B.C. to be out of sync. That’s what Ray Demarchi found when he worked for the province’s fish and wildlife branch in Cranbrook, which is on Mountain time. Factor in opening and closing hours, lunch and coffee breaks, and the one-hour time difference left only narrow windows to communicate with colleagues elsewhere in B.C. “Out of a 7 1/2-hour day, I had two and a half hours to talk to anybody in Victoria.”
Demarchi, who retired as B.C.’s chief of wildlife, now lives in Cowichan Bay, where he maintains the newtimezones.com website dedicated to reducing the number of North American time zones. Given the lack of response from politicians, it might as well be dedicated to free unicorn rides, but he deserves marks for perseverance.
His basic argument is that existing time zones no longer make sense — a realization he came to while driving 2,000 kilometres through Alabama and Texas without once having to adjust his watch. The zones might have been practical before electric lighting was commonplace, but they sure aren’t now that instant communication and modern economies have shrunk the world.
He’ll get little argument from those who must stumble out of bed at the crack of dawn to match the markets in New York and Toronto, or who stifle yawns on those conference calls that begin at 9 a.m. in Montreal but at walk-of-shame o’clock in B.C.
The grogginess will be magnified after the arrival of daylight time robs us of an hour’s sleep tonight. Spring forward, smash the alarm clock with a shoe, fall back to bed.
Demarchi proposes merging the Pacific and Mountain time zones into a single Western zone. For us, that would mean being on the same clock as Alberta — as is already the case for B.C.’s East Kootenay and Peace River regions — and closing the gap with the East to two hours.
Since Canada always follows the American lead (as it did in 2007 in moving daylight time up by three weeks in the spring and extending it a week in the fall), he has sent his idea directly to the western U.S. governors.
“Other countries have and are making modifications in their time zones in order to increase economic and social communications between their citizens,” he wrote. “China, which is slightly wider than the contiguous U.S.A., has concluded that the entire country should operate on a single time zone; India, which technically covers two time zones, has reduced them to a single time zone and Russia recently joined the growing number of countries that have either consolidated their time zones or otherwise adjusted the clock to optimize daylight.”
Alas, the governors gave no indication of catching Demarchi’s pitch, though Alaska legislators decided this week to take a closer look at a proposal to put the state on Pacific time. Alaskans are currently one or two hours behind us.
Some Americans have also advanced the notion of dumping daylight time altogether, as is already the case in Arizona and Hawaii. Alaska, Oregon and Washington state legislators are flirting with the idea, though B.C. has shown little interest in following suit. “While we will follow the outcome of the Washington bill with interest, we are not considering changes to daylight saving time,” the province’s Justice Ministry said last month.
All of which means that you’ll probably stumble into work in your pajamas next week, but the eastern hockey games will still be half over by the time you head home. You can try complaining to Ottawa, but best do it before noon.
