Daylight time and twice-changed clocks: The snooze you lose

One Edmonton NDP MLA and one PC party leadership hopeful both want to scrap Alberta's practice of switching the clocks twice a year to daylight time and back again to standard time for four months of the year.

I'm with them. The twice-yearly changing of our clocks to theoretically make the best of our daylight hours in winter and in summer has more drawbacks than gains. The question today should be about whether we really need to be on standard time at all anymore.

In the deepest winter months, it's dark when you rise and getting dark when you get home from work or school anyway. Being on standard time for two of the four months we still use it doesn't allow us any special access to having sun in our eyes. In winter, we need to “save” all the daylight we can, so why not access that time in the afternoon?

Businesses seem to like daylight time; the theory goes that we have an extra hour to spend money while the sun shines at the end of the day.

But the studies on that issue I was able to find suggest that any increases in consumer spending as a result of daylight time are not that great, except for gasoline sales, for people hitting the big box stores outside of town.

A proposal to increase daylight time adoption in the U.S. in 2005 suggested energy savings would accrue, as people wouldn't need to turn the lights on as much. But when they checked actual experience, researchers found that if there was a bit less power used for lighting with daylight time, there was more use of air conditioning, which is much more energy-intensive.

So leave aside the consumer and energy efficiency arguments; people just want to see more of the sun. In our social order, the best time for that is in the afternoon and evening. All year.

That's part of the argument of Vermillion-Lloydminster MLA Richard Stark, who is also in the running for leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives.

He claims there is strong support in the province for the notion of just adopting one time scheme, and not switching back and forth.

But, being a politician and not a leader, Stark wants to consult deeply and hold an actual referendum before acting on his convictions. So forget the ability to change things.

A gripe: Can't a leader just make the call, and do what he or she considers best? (Well, yes, we have that south of the border, and this is probably not the best opportunity to make this point, but there you are.)

Thomas Dang, NDP MLA for Edmonton-Southwest, is more hip. He's set up an online survey.

I've contributed to the survey, and you can, too. Go online at albertandpcaucus.ca/daylight-saving-time-survey.

It's a far better survey that the doomed online study the federal Liberals did on electoral reform. It actually allows you to state a preference.

It also comes with a time chart that is quite helpful. You will learn that if we stuck ourselves on daylight time year-round, on Dec. 21, we wouldn't get sunrise until 9:38 in the morning, (I'm using Edmonton time here) but kids would have sun in the sky on the way home from school, and we all would be spared dark-to-work and dark-to-home commutes.

There are plenty of places in Alberta that have less sun in the winter than us. In Fort McMurray, in December there's no sun for morning or evening commutes to work or to school, in either format. So why not select the format that accommodates most people?

Farmers who have animals under their care don't like the twice-yearly switch. Truth be told, neither do most of us. You never really get that lost sleep back.

News stories abound about the increased rate of traffic accidents and heart attacks in the days just following a switch from standard time to daylight time. That seems to wipe out any purported benefits to society from consumer spending or energy use.

So why switch? Find one format that works, stick with it and let our bodies (and our farm animals' bodies) adapt just once.

My vote is for daylight time all year round. Go online if you like, and get your two cents worth registered in the online survey.

And when you get to retire like me, you could just grab an afternoon nap before some late-day activity — out in the sun.

Take that, millennials, your culture is already old

My university days go back to a time when almost all classes were taught by real, tenured, professors with real PhDs, and not sessionals working for the hourly wages of a fast-food cook while also completing their own doctorates.

We were expected to disagree with our instructors in class — let's say it was in the interests of critical thought and the discovery of truth.

I recall my favourite poli-sci prof at one point declaiming against the music of our time. He suggested that in 30 years nobody would remember Three Dog Night, for instance, but that Beethoven would live forever. Let the protests begin.

Well, with CBC 2 radio playing Beethoven in the background in my living room I can claim today my prof was wrong. See? There's Three Dog Night, right there, in Wikipedia.

I relate this as it was brought to mind by the release of a trailer for the new live-action movie Beauty and the Beast. Could that be Emma Watson — our little Hermione from Hogwarts — as Belle? Well, haven't we grown up.

I'm going to suggest — obviously without having seen the movie with my grandkids yet — that by the end of this year Watson will be more famous worldwide for her performance as Belle, than as the precocious witch in the earthshaking Harry Potter movie series.

This is how time flies. When we first met Hermione on the big screen, the majority of the soon-to-be lifetime fans of Belle were not yet born. Not only that, but many of them may well need to wait a couple of years before being old enough to appreciate the action in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

The inaugural Potter book that inspired the movie series is now 20 years old. We have the book series, scattered among family, and we will need to gather it all back for the next generation to enjoy — when they're old enough.

But they will be mighty surprised when we locate the movies, and they see Hermione being about their age, frizzy hair and all, doing magic. Is that Belle? they will say. Not the other way round.

They will know Watson from her dancing with Beast, not for trading barbs with Ron Weasley.

Generations X, Y and Millennials will learn a lesson I was warned of — but did not really learn — way back when, from my pol-sci prof: your time will end.

Harry Potter may well live for generations yet, but not the millions of youngsters who may have gotten their first “big reader” experience with his books. His image, engraved digitally on millions of DVDs, will not age, except in the 10 years it took to get from The Philosopher's Stone to The Deathly Hallows.

We Baby Boomers are often accused of not moving aside to give space to our future leaders. Not me. I am quite comfortable bequeathing them full control of the world. I fully believe they will do a more equitable, sustainable and compassionate job of it than we have.

I got old the evening I realized the NHL players I watched on the screen were just . . . kids.

My kids will realize their age, when they recognize that their own children know Emma Watson better as Belle, than as Hermione.

How about that, Millennials? How does that feel?

Reform is impossible in system at war with itself

It is unfortunate that the federal Liberals have broken their promise to change the way we would have elected our next government. Even though few Canadians seem to care that our current system of voting does not produce particularly representative governments, they do seem to care when signature campaign promises are broken.

Especially the unfortunate ones.

I myself was heartened to find a government that was elected to a majority of seats with a minority of voter support saying the right words about how change was needed.

Back in 2015, change for the better seemed so possible. But sunny ways have been darkened since then by clouds of extremist politics drifting in from the south. Doing what you believe is right has become more difficult; doing what is patently wrong has become the way to get attention and support.

I'm not ready to admit that proposing electoral change was a bad idea, but changes in the landscape since the last election show that developing a broad consensus for big changes has become pretty well impossible.

Consider the response of the critics when the decision to drop electoral reform was made by the government's new Minister of Democratic Institutions (yes, we have one of those; it was created to drive the promised electoral reform to completion). Karina Gould read her marching orders to a gathering of the press, and revealed that reforming our voting system was no longer part of her mandate.

NDP critic Nathan Cullen, generally a reasonable debater given to measured words, blew a gasket.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau proved himself a liar, the most cynical variety of politician, said Cullen. He charged that Trudeau would say anything to get elected, and then after the election use any weak excuse to justify all his lies.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May claimed she felt deeply betrayed over Trudeau's breaking faith with young voters.

The NDP and the Green Party have the most to gain through electoral reform, particularly in its most complicated form, proportional representation.

The Conservatives, not so much. They believe their greatest chances at winning a general election lay in there being no changes at all to our first-past-the-post voting system. So they demanded that any changes be sent to a national referendum where the waters could be sufficiently muddied to ensure no changes would ever be made. So the most invective their leader Rona Ambrose could raise was to warn Canadians against believing anything Justin Trudeau might say.

As May remarked about the dangers of cynicism in politics, it has enough to feed itself. But cynicism in politics does not just feed itself today, it is the total of all three courses of the meal.

This is a government at war with itself. There is no coming together to reach a reasonable agreement on anything.

Just reflect on what's changed since the last federal election in 2015. Canada has gone from repudiating cynical and divisive politics, to a full-blown adoption of the dark side.

Are we that much different anymore in our views and in our society than the ultra-polarized United States? Is there a comfortable centre still remaining where people can discuss things respectfully, recognize that the greater good stretches beyond personal gain and find rational compromises?

If there is such a place, it's being well hidden.

It's too bad that the Liberals didn't have a fleshed-out program of electoral reform to introduce immediately after the election, while goodwill still existed in this country. It's too bad all sides worked so immediately for the good for their party, and not the good of the nation.

As events have passed, it's a relief that Trudeau chose to take the hit for abandoning the idea, rather than trying to push electoral reform through the mud hole our politics have become, to the harm of all.

Trudeau may have broken a promise, but I say all the parties have broken faith with Canadians in this.