10mo ago

Petition - Stop Daylight Saving Time in Canada - Change.org

Stop Daylight Saving Time in Canada

Join the petition to ask the Canadian government to adopt Standard Time all year round.

"Changing clocks twice a year is hazardous to your health. There are many studies showing that changing the clock and staying on Daylight Saving Time negatively impacts our circadian rhythm, causes increases in strokes and heart attacks, impacts people with depression and seasonal affective disorder and causes more car accidents.

I ask the Canadian Government to finally stop Daylight Saving Time and enact Permanent Standard Time. Even if one person is saved from having a stroke or heart attack or is saved from a car accident, it's worth it. Support the health and safety of Canadians and set an example for the rest of the world.

Follow the scientific research. Do the right thing and not just the easy and uninformed thing. Don’t change the clocks. Leave them on Standard Time year round. Do not spring forward."

83 comments

Agree with the sentiment but these online petitions are worthless in my opinion
- Absolutely, first I think it is a provincial jurisdiction, and for instance Québec already said that they will align with NY state jurisdiction, so this petition is useless.
  
  Ontario also has legislation that says they'll align with Québec and New York.
- I'll agree, with one exception (which might prove the rule): www.ourcommons.ca which hosts official House of Commons petitions (I believe some provinces have a similar website).

No. I want daylight savings time all year round. Standard time is balls.
- I couldn't care less about which mode we're on. It's like debating if we should remain sitting down or standing up to avoid getting punched in the face or the dick. Just stop fucking hitting us!
  
  I want more sunlight in the evening for my activities after my 9-5 job!
  What's the fucking point of having sunlight at 5am if I'm fucking sleeping?

Some good analysis on why having summer time as the permanent time would be good for safety
https://drivingintherealworld.com/turning-back-time-a-strike-against-pedestrians-literally/
- I think this is a logical folly that demonstrates how warped our view of reality has become. Because it seems we would rather change time than simply change our working hours. It‘s a little bit conspicuous that this is never being considered in a discussion that happens all over the world.
  
  I think it has been considered plenty, both for health and safety reasons. e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2603528/
  I think the discussion is centered around shifting the time zone because it addresses the problem more effectively, with a single decision made by the appropriate body (the govt). But you can message your school board and your company departments asking them to take the matter to their own hands too. The more organizations doing this, the more likely we are to push this provincially

Join the petition to ask the Canadian government to adopt Daylight Time all year round.
I ask the Canadian Government to finally stop Daylight Saving Time and enact Permanent Standard Time.
So uhh.. which is it?
I want the current time (DST) forever and will sign accordinly
- It was the latter. Op seems to have updated their post accordingly.
- Standard time is sometimes referred to as "winter time" or "normal time", while daylight savings time (DST) may also be called summer time, especially in the UK.
  More than 60% of the countries in the world use standard time all year.
  The remaining countries use DST during the summer months, generally setting clocks forward one hour from standard time.
  Canada is divided into six time zones. Most areas of the country's provinces and territories operate on standard time from the first Sunday in November to the second Sunday in March and daylight saving time the rest of the year.
  In the regions of Canada that use daylight saving time, it begins on the second Sunday of March at 2 a.m. and ends on the first Sunday in November at 2 a.m. As a result, daylight saving time lasts in Canada for a total of 34 weeks (238 days) every year.
  
  You wrote all that out and it doesn't even answer his question.

Good initial, but why not do a proper Citizen Petition in your state instead of a scam for profit website?
- I think that would have to go by province, in Canada.
  
  State and country can be used interchangeably
- Okay, you got me hooked. Give us the details so we can see what you see. We promise to keep an open mind.

Honest question. Can someone tell me of any time an online petition actually amounted to change in the real world?
- I'm not sure about these "change" petitions which always seemed to me as just a way to gather user data. But, go to the House of Commons website where you will be able to view actual petitions to the government of Canada. There, you can sign them and/or create your own. If you're lucky, the government may even respond with some thoughts/excuses. 🙂

I just hate how in Toronto the sun comes up/goes down an hour too early year round
This won’t change that though, I need to live at the western edge of a timezone

I think the whole world just adopt a single time. We'd just get used to midday being 9pm and eating dinner at 2am. No more time zones to worry about.
- Not as simple as that because first: Timezones make it pretty obvious that you have to think or even calculate if it's currently the day or middle of the night. If you want to call someone in another country it's obvious that you'd first have to figure out their local time. If everyone used the same time than this would be easy, but you would've still have to figure out which time range is day time and night time so no benefit there.
  For a lot of countries that would also mean that every "solar day" will be two calender days. You wake up at 19:00 March 1st. and just before lunch the date switches to March 2nd. It would be a mess.
  
  It would make it so much harder. With time zones I have additional information beyond UTC.
- Worldwide UTC now!
- UTC is a thing and used by many industries!
- China only has has one time zone for the whole country. Daylight savings can go, but I can understand that because of the earths orbit around the sun there is a need for time zones, I think most people agree that wherever you are, 6am should be morning time, unless everyone wants to move over to military time, and just have a 24 hour clock. It would take some getting used to, but that would be the only way to truly get rid of time zones.
  
  Much of Europe is already using 24hr time.
- It would make it so much harder to schedule meetings if I didn't have a handy internationally standardized conversation table that was incorporated into all software to help me know when someone's working hours are.
- I've said that for years now, bring back Swatch .beats!
  It's a shame it never caught on, especially in the internet age.
- And then you go to a different country and suddenly you don't know when you eat dinner.
  
  I don't know about you, but I eat when I'm hungry.

IIRC didn't a recent prime minister (probably Trudeau) say that we would do it if the US also did it? I agree that DST is a mistake but I think doing it without coordination of the US would be cause fare more pain than benefits.
The EU also recommended member states to stop doing DST if I recall correctly. So it seems like if the US can be convinced the world would pretty quickly move away from DST.
On the other hand aren't the health concerns mostly bunk? I remember seeing a lot of studies that noted an uptick of various issues during a DST transition but closer inspection revealed that the vast majority of this effect was time-shifting of issues that were going to happen anyways. Basically if you were going to have a heart attack in the next week you will have it during the jump, but if you look at the week or month overall there was no statically significant change. I do admit that I am behind on research here though. Are there any well reviewed meta-analysis that are showing significant results?
- Yes, there is some decent research on this though nothing super definitive because most research is still very local. Specially on traffic accidents, most security experts agree that having DST permanent would be beneficial.
  I'm the opinion that having fewer crashes would offset the mild annoyance of being 1 hour out of sync with the US, but I'm not too strong on this stance either. We have other things that have higher return for same level of effort to implement... like better car lighting regulations that as always the US (NHTSA) is fucking motionless and we're locked to them.
  I'd put all chips to eliminating RTOR but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime.

Join the petition to ask the Canadian government to adopt Daylight Time all year round.
I ask the Canadian Government to finally stop Daylight Saving Time and enact Permanent Standard Time.
Is the first line supposed to be Standard Time?

Get rid of dst yes, not make it permanent.
- Doesn't matter. We can change the schedule instead of changing the clocks.

Ah yes, few things are as reliable as the post DST petition.
If people started doing this BEFORE the switch I might actually remember to change all my (dumb)clocks.

I'll respectfully say, "NO".
It would hurt my physical and mental health more to see the sun set at 7:30-8pm during the summer, and would benefit no one for the sun to come up at 4:30am in Toronto.
But from a population perspective, the idea for permanent standard time Canada-widel is flawed.
Sleep is more negatively impacted by people's phone use and caffeine consumption, not the time.
Car accidents are impacted more by phone use and distractions inside of cars; and the fact that large SUVs basically kill everyone. It's interesting to note that traffic fatalities in Saskatchewan (permanent standard time) is considerably higher than other provinces.
Heart attacks and strokes are 99% lifestyle-related: with diet and exercise being the most important factors. You might be surprised to hear that watching a live sporting event also contributes to heart attacks, but I'm sure nobody wants to ban hockey.
Also as an FYI, heart failure is higher in Saskatchewan (permanent standard time) vs Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, etc. (all have DTS half the year).
I appreciate the desire to reduce deaths and car accidents, but there are significantly better ways to do it.
- We could keep the summer time. 😁
  
  A.K.A. keeping things as they are. 🤗
  Jokes aside, it looks like the petition is for permanent Standard Time and not DST.
  If it were for the latter, it would be problematic as the sun would rise past 9 am in some places for many months out of the year, putting kids and commuters at greater risk.
  Really, keeping the thing as it is sounds like the lesser of the three evils.

Can we do it after they give me my hour of sleep back though? I suspect they'd just do it after the stupid "spring forward" and rob us of that precious hour
- I'd rather be on permanent daylight saving time since I hate it when it gets dark so early.
- Don't be picky.
  
  Nah, I'll be picky because this shit fucks me up for months. Going back the other way messes me up for a much shorter time.
  Fucking normies and their daytime schedules lol. Us night walkers get no respect 😂

Do Feb 29th next
- That's not the same thing and would lead to calendar drift pretty quickly.
  
  Just take a day from another 31 day month.

No thanks. BC has super early sunrise in summer with Daylight savings, going back to standard time for summer would put the daylight starting about 3:30-4am
Each province should work out what suits their average day. BC we get 45 minutes more early morning sun, Ontario and East gets about 45 mins later sun.
- BC's plan is to stay on daylight time.
  
  Premier David Eby has said change will be enacted once Washington state, Oregon, California also make the move
  How likely is this to happen in the next few years, though? Seems hopeless to me.
  
  Yay!!!
  
  So their plan is 3:30am sunrise?

Jeebus, the things people get worked up about.
- Found the person who isn't a programmer
  
  Yah, every programmer gives a shit about DST. Literally all of them.

83 comments