BURST
The province’s decision to scrap the twice-annual time changes and make daylight time permanent is getting mixed reaction from businesses who are happy they won’t have to change their clocks any longer but will likely face some adjustments for cross-border trade with the United States.
With the changes, announced Monday by Premier David Eby and Attorney General Niki Sharma, the province will be an hour ahead of the states of Washington, Oregon and California from November through March but aligned with the Pacific states the rest of the year.
B.C. will also be aligned with Alberta during the winter months and an hour behind the rest of the time, unless Alberta Premier Danielle Smith follows through on her musings that her province should follow B.C.’s lead.
Kaolin Mallette, vice-president of Penticton-based shipping company Berry&Smith, said that as a citizen he is thrilled with the elimination of the time changes but as a business leader he does have some minor concerns.
“The difference in times between Alberta, Washington, Oregon, we’re standardized with them half a year, and then the other half, realistically, it just creates challenges with border crossings, appointment times, all those kind of things,” he said.
“So it’s definitely going to be a learning curve. I might imagine there’s going to be challenges that we don’t even know of yet. We really haven’t had time to process this and really think of the other implications.”
For other businesses, however, the elimination of the time changes is welcome as it reduces the confusion workers face twice a year when they come into effect.
Don Dauphney, owner of Urban Valley Transport, a courier and freight services provider based in Mission, said he welcomed the B.C. government’s decision because it’ll lead to safer roads.
“On the safety side of things, I think it would be way better, safer. I don’t know if you’ve read the stats, when there is a time change and we go one hour ahead, how many accidents there are that week,” he said.
Somebody who is intoxicated and gets behind the wheel poses a safety issue, he said. Someone who is suffering from lack of sleep is also impaired.
“With no time change, there’s more consistency there. … It brings consistency to the overall well-being of the operator that’s driving the vehicle.
Surjit Singh Gosal, owner of Gosal Farms in Surrey, said he believes staying on one consistent time for the whole year will be good for his business.
He said he often finds employees can have problems when they have to navigate going to work around the time change and that losing an hour of sleep each March can be bad for productivity.
“When you have one set time, a worker knows that time,” said Gosal. “One week, they get confused. ‘Are we going with the early time or the new time or the past time?’ So it makes it confusing. And also your mindset is you used to have that time.”
Danielle Synotte, executive director of the Agriculture Council of B.C., said it is a myth that daylight time, the twice annual time changes, were created to help farmers. She said in a statement that it often hurts them by disrupting the sensitive schedules that agriculture revolves around.
“Agricultural groups strongly opposed it because it disrupted early morning work schedules, such as milking, and reduced crucial morning daylight for harvesting,” she said, while acknowledging most of her members don’t have a strong opinion on it.
The preference for many of those who support scrapping the time changes is that B.C. would have done it in lockstep with Washington, Oregon and California, which have been talking about making the change for years but need congressional approval that has never come.
In 2019, Washington passed legislation paving the way for making daylight time permanent. That bill has remained in limbo ever since and the state government said it did not have a comment on Tuesday.
Marc Abshire, Port Angeles Chamber of Commerce executive director, said he is happy to B.C. is scrapping time changes and hopes that it provides some momentum for the Pacific states to follow suit.
He said there will be some disruption for people travelling the short distance between northern Washington and B.C. during the winter months as they will have to switch their clocks an hour. But he said most tourism shouldn’t be affected as the jurisdictions will still be aligned during the summer months.
“II think B.C. going away from daylight-saving time is going to help the case for Washington state, Oregon and California to follow suit,” said Abshire. “There’s a grassroots opinion across the United States that daylight-saving time changes twice a year need to go away.”
Ian Paton, Conservative agriculture critic and MLA for Delta South, said the main challenges for British Columbians will be around more mundane things like Vancouver Canucks games starting at 8 p.m. for games in Washington or California instead of the current 7 p.m.
At the same time, he said many of his constituents have properties in the American exclave of Point Roberts and may find it confusing to have to change their watches every time they go in and out.
“There’s hundreds and hundreds of people from Vancouver, the Lower Mainland and Delta, of course, that have summer cottages in Point Roberts. There’s a huge marina down there. Probably 90 per cent of the boats in the marina down there are Canadian-owned boats,” said Paton.
“So it’s pretty weird that you could be in downtown Tsawwassen, and four minutes later you drive across the border into Point Roberts and you’re in a different time zone, like that seems very odd to me.”