Are Canadians ready to ‘ditch the switch’ with Daylight Saving Time?

Quite honestly, why do we still have daylight saving time? We can’t think of any rational purpose that it still serves in a modern society today. Now most people still think that daylight saving time is useful for farmers and we should keep it for their benefit, but much like the myth about school summer holidays being for the benefit of farmers, this is not entirely true. Logically the animals and plants that farmers are growing and taking care of as part of their job do not care, or even comprehend our human concept of time regardless of it being spring forward, or fall back. Daylight saving time was only implemented back during the second year of World War I by Germany. This was to conserve power for the war effort, which makes sense, but with our current technology, and not being directly involved in any wars, should we still continue to follow daylight saving time?

Nowadays, daylight saving time has the exact opposite effect on power consumption compared to the time of World War I. Now when we are required to get up earlier in the spring, it means we’re turning lights on again, after just having a week of natural sunlight illuminating our surroundings in the morning. So any claims that daylight saving time saves power are invalid, since we are purposely extending the period of time that we need electricity to create artificial light in the morning by another month. Additionally, we also have this exact same problem in the fall, except in the evening where you go from having some natural light for your evening activities to no natural light for your evening activities over the span of one day. Additionally, with the spring there’s also the problem of needing to get up earlier. Our natural circadian rhythm takes a couple weeks to adjust to changes so daylight saving time naturally causes us to be more groggy and less aware of our surroundings, which can be extremely dangerous, especially for individuals who have to commute to work.

Daylight saving time also serves as a bit of a logistical nightmare when it comes to certain business operations since the world doesn’t uniformly transition on the same day. Since we exist in a 24-hour society with many businesses communicating with other entities, internationally daylight saving time serves as an another unnecessary hurdle when trying to already orchestrate meetings across time zones. Then there are also places like Mexico and Saskatchewan who do not observe daylight saving time to consider as well. If there was going to be a meeting between individuals in London and people in Edmonton and Regina they would have to figure out three different times for people to show up, due to daylight saving time despite Edmonton and Regina both being on Mountain Standard Time. Then they would potentially have to re-calculate this all again, since the UK’s daylight saving time is 14 days after Canada’s.

Fundamentally, daylight saving time right now is an unnecessary aspect of our modern life. It no longer provides any benefit and ultimately provides more hindrance. The only argument to keep daylight savings time is that all of us have observed daylight saving time for our entire life, but just because we’ve been constantly doing something impractical for our entire lives, doesn’t mean we should keep doing it.

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