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There was much more to Ray Demarchi than his efforts to alter time.
The Cowichan Bay man, who died Sept. 28 at age 81, was best known for his passion for B.C.’s natural world and his outspoken, boots-on-the-ground efforts to protect wildlife and the habitat that supports it.
He was also a boisterous, gregarious, accordion-playing ton of fun. In 1994, when he was promoted to become the province’s chief of wildlife conservation, the woman with whom he had until then shared an office wrote a tongue-in-cheek ad for a replacement roomie. “Must be an excitable, temperamental, feisty, won’t take or entertain no for an answer, outspoken Italian male,” it began.
But since today is the day that we contemplate the wisdom of our twice-a-year changing of the clocks, let’s just focus on that slice of Demarchi’s life devoted to how we divide time.
While the rest of us argued and debated the merits of falling back and springing forward, Demarchi was questioning bigger things, like the very basis of time zone boundaries themselves. What Demarchi proposed, as outlined on a website he dedicated to the cause, was to shrink the number of North American time zones by one. That, according to Demarchi, would result in a 100 per cent increase in the overlap of the amount of time spent working by both Americans and Canadians across the continent, potentially increasing their unity, security and productivity.
He got the idea while driving from Alabama to Texas, a 2,000-kilometre haul in which he didn’t once need to change his watch. It was a pleasant change to the pain-in-the-butt differences that force British Columbians to phone Ottawa before lunch if they want to deal with their own government before it turns off the lights for the day.
Our time zones don’t work, Demarchi argued. They might have made sense before electric light was common, but they just get in the way in an age in which the person you need to talk to is just as likely to be at the other end of Canada as next door. How is the country supposed to function when there are just three hours a day during which we’re all at our desks at the same time? Factor in lunch breaks in Ontario, coffee breaks in Quebec, weed breaks in B.C. and Screech breaks in Newfoundland, and the window is down to about 45 minutes.
Things are even out of whack within B.C. When Demarchi worked for the province’s fish and wildlife branch in Cranbrook, which is on Alberta Redneck Time (or whatever it’s called), the one-hour-apart office opening and closing times, lunches and coffees made it hard to reach colleagues in the rest of the province. “Out of a 7 1/2-hour day, I had 2 1/2 hours to talk to anybody in Victoria,” he said.
None of this is a revelation to people whose jobs require them to lurch out of bed in the dark to match the markets in New York, or who fall asleep in Zoom meetings that begin at 9 a.m. in Toronto but at step-on-the-cat o’clock on Vancouver Island. At the other end of the day, we’re still at our desks in Victoria when they drop the puck in Montreal. When you drunkenly call old pals at 9 p.m. in B.C., they remind you that A) it’s 1 a.m. in Halifax and B) you’re not pals anymore.
So, under Demarchi’s plan, we in B.C. (at least, in the parts in the Pacific time zone) would move our clocks ahead half an hour. The rest of the country, save for Newfoundland, would shift back by 30 minutes. That would leave B.C. and Alberta in sync (if only on our watches) in a single time zone. The gap between Victoria and Toronto would be cut to two hours. Similar changes would be mirrored in the U.S.
If that seems too radical a shift, note that China, which is more than 5,000 kilometres wide, has just one time zone.
Will Demarchi’s idea ever be adopted? Probably not. Someone in power would have to pick up the torch first.
It wouldn’t be the first time a Canadian changed the clock, though. Today’s international time zones resulted from the efforts of Sir Sandford Fleming, who came up with the idea of Universal Standard Time in the late 19th century, when the spread of railroads led to the need for a common clock. Prior to that, every city or region determined its own time and went off on its own, which, coincidentally, is the way most decisions are made here in Dysfunction-By-The-Sea.
