As B.C., Washington, Oregon and California debate whether they should adopt permanent daylight savings time, the Yukon has made the absolutely terrible decision of going to permanent Pacific daylight time. We best hope B.C. doesn’t look to them for inspiration.
Now, of course, we shouldn’t be pushing the clock back and forth every year. There are all kinds of reasons, including more collisions, groggier children in school etc. as a result of the annual time change. It absolutely makes sense to pick one time and stick with it. However, if we’re going to pick a time, it should absolutely be wintertime.
You may be scratching your head wondering why wintertime is so much better than summer (daylight) time. Our bodies have a natural clock. Melatonin, which helps our body sleep, is suppressed when the sun rises. However, if you don’t wake up naturally, for example before the sun is up, those hormones don’t kick in as they should which can increase the risk for everything from heart disease to depression. In other words, it’s best for us if our natural cycle lines up with that of the sun (sun at its highest point at noon type of thing).
Picking permanent daylight time means that for the entire year the sun comes up one hour later than usual.
For B.C., choosing daylight time is literally like choosing the time zone appropriate for Denver or Regina. It makes absolutely no sense and means waking up in the dark even more often.
Think of how hard it is to get a teenager out of bed in the morning. Now imagine doing it an hour earlier every day for the entire year just for the fun of it.
The decision the Yukon just made is worse than that. You see, we tend to think of the Yukon as being right above B.C. because of how we turn a round globe into a flat map. Only it’s not. Most of the Yukon, including Whitehorse where most of the people live, would naturally fall an hour behind B.C. in a time zone basically all by itself. For convenience, countries, including Canada don’t actually always follow where the hour line actually falls. After all, it wouldn’t exactly be great to have two separate time zones in B.C. with Prince Rupert in one and Vancouver in another. So instead, we’ve grouped all of B.C. in with the west coast of the U.S. The Yukon has also taken this approach which means it’s already an hour off. In other words, you’d be waking up that teenager two hours earlier than is normal. It would be like B.C. choosing the time period appropriate for New Orleans or Chicago. In other words, if you live in Whitehorse and wake up at 7 a.m. every day, you’re waking up in the dark seven months out of the year now. If they picked the time zone appropriate for the Yukon, you’d be waking up in the dark only about three months out of the year.
Let’s not be as dumb as that.
