Should Manitobans abandon the practice of changing their clocks twice a year? Only time — and a survey — will tell.
The province launched that survey Wednesday, with Premier Wab Kinew encouraging the public in social media posts to weigh in on what has been an enduring debate across Canada for decades.
The survey asks if Manitobans prefer to stay the course or choose a permanent time. If the latter, it asks if the province should stay on standard time, which brings an earlier sunrise, or lock into daylight time and its later sunsets.
The survey page also includes a link to a five-page fact sheet on the health impacts of time changes.
“The times, they are a-changing here in Manitoba, and we might stop changing our time. But which way should we go?” Kinew asks in the social media post.
The survey will be available until Aug. 31, a government spokesperson told CBC News.
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In most Canadian provinces and territories, clocks spring forward on the second Sunday in March and fall back on the first Sunday in November.
British Columbia announced in March that it intends to remain on daylight time permanently.
In April, Alberta announced plans to table legislation to cement a move to daylight time. Days later, the Northwest Territories said it will also end time changes.
They will all join Saskatchewan and Yukon, which already maintain permanent standard time.
Asked in March, after B.C.’s announcement, whether Manitoba would follow suit, Kinew brushed the idea off, saying Manitoba had more important things to tackle.
But Kinew later softened his stance, suggesting it may be time to revisit the issue.
The premier said last month the days of changing clocks are “pretty much at the end” in Manitoba, and that he hoped to have a decision by year’s end.
Kinew has raised the issue before. When his NDP was the Official Opposition in 2019, the party launched a website to gauge public interest on the topic.
It generated mixed reactions, Kinew said this year as the debate heated up again.
Under the Progressive Conservatives, Manitoba introduced legislation in 2022 to adopt permanent daylight time, but only if the U.S. did so as well.
Many jurisdictions in Eastern Canada have expressed interest in casting off time changes, but have also hesitated over not wanting to stray from the time zone observed by their immediate neighbours.
The modern origins of daylight saving time trace back to the First World War, as people realized they could cut back on fuel use by pushing clocks back an hour, extending available sunlight later into the evening. By the 1960s, the time change had become a general practice.
The practice has hung on, in large part because people like having those long summer evenings, Chad Orzel, the author of A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks, told CBC in an interview last month.
The time change was adjusted, though, in 2007, when the start of daylight time was moved three weeks earlier in the spring and the return to standard time a week later in the fall.
