No extra sleep for you – B.C. petition calls for end to daylight savings time

KAMLOOPS, B.C. – Clocks in most of Canada will go back an hour early Sunday morning, but not everyone is pleased with the extra time for sleep.

“People with sleep disorders don’t get an extra hour of sleep. They get an extra hour of laying there thinking about not sleeping,” says Tara Holmes.

Holmes is one of two Kamloops, B.C., residents who have created an online petition urging the provincial government to do away with daylight time, where clocks leap forward an hour in March and fall back in November.

Daylight time has been a pet peeve for Bob Dieno, the petition’s co-founder, since university when he slept in on the day the clocks switched and missed the final exam in his chemistry class.

The time change is archaic and disruptive, Holmes argues, especially for people who have sensitive internal clocks, such as seniors and children.

There are also studies, Holmes says, that have found an increase in workplace and road accidents in the weeks following time changes.

“It’s crazy when you look at the impact this has,” she says. “There’s so many reasons that we shouldn’t do it but I don’t think there are many reasons why we should.”

Some parts of Canada don’t observe the time change, including almost all of Saskatchewan, which is on central standard time year-round.

Other places the time change doesn’t apply include the northeastern corner of British Columbia, the town of Creston in B.C.’s East Kootenay region, three northwestern Ontario communities located in the Central Time Zone, the eastern reaches of Quebec’s North Shore, and Southampton Island in Nunavut.

Abolishing daylight time in B.C. would make the time uniform across the province year-round, Holmes argues.

Originally, the pair had hoped to get 10,000 people to sign the petition within four months. However, more than 13,000 added their names in a matter of weeks.

Now they are aiming to get more than 15,000 signatures before presenting the petition to the government.

Holmes says she’s happy people are having a conversation about daylight time, even if politicians don’t make the change.