I double daylight dare you

By Ivan Morgan

Why do we still have daylight savings time? The answer is for no reason. It never really made sense back in the day and it makes less sense now. Yet twice a year we change our clocks. For no good reason. For most of us it exists only to torment us when we try and figure out how to reprogram the time on our microwaves and cars.

I see daylight savings as a political metaphor, as an example of things we don’t seem to change regardless of how pointless they are. Like St. John’s City Council.

Like so many things in our lives, we do it because we always have, without thinking. There may be no reason for doing it, but there is also no political will to change the practice. Look around you and you can see other examples. Why do we still have phonebooks? The phone company once spent a lot of time, effort and money collating and printing one for every household. Now that no one uses them why do they still make them? They just do. I look forward to the day when they stop and pass the savings off to us on our bill. Har har.
Stop and ask people why they think we still observe daylight savings and you will hear some weird answers.
I remember as a lad being told it was to help farmers. Do the research. It was never about that. Cows can’t tell time. Saskatchewan gave up on it years ago. Nunavut gave it up too.

Research also shows it was created in Germany to save energy during the First World War. That may have been true over one hundred years ago, but it ain’t now.

I have been told it protects kids from walking to school in the dark. It is supposed to give us extra long summer evenings. It helps reduce evening traffic accidents and crime. The list of malarkey goes on.
Fiddling with clocks has no impact on celestial motion. No daylight is “saved.”

Folks of a certain generation remember Newfoundland’s double daylight savings, which the Peckford administration introduced in 1988 as an experiment. That summer we moved our clocks ahead two hours (instead of the one we still do) to “give” folks extra hours of evening sunlight. I remember it well. I remember landing a trout in broad daylight at ten in the evening. I remember it was a job getting the kids to bed (but wasn’t it always?).

I remember too the racket. Folks who didn’t like it were very vocal. That’s always the case. No matter what you do, a certain segment of the population will hate it, and be very vocal in their anger. I once wrote a story about the racket when Cabot Tower was built in 1898. People were furious. Lots of letters to the editor. A blight on the city’s scenery! Ruining the city’s majestic skyline!

The same happened with double daylight. Government did it for a lark, and it hurt them. Everyone weighed in on it. All it really accomplished was to allow opposition forces to highlight how useless the Tories had become. It created political baggage that dogged the stale Peckford administration ‘til they were thrown out.
Double daylight never caught on, hurt the government of the day, and all for what? Nothing. That’s why no leader will address it today. Anywhere. Why cause a controversy for no reason? So rather than tackle the issue, our stove clocks are wrong twice a year.

We as a province, as a nation, have tough decisions facing us. This isn’t one of them.

We live in the North. Daylight is shorter in winter. Moving our clocks around has no effect on that. The practice is useless, annoying and a waste of… wait for it!… time.

It’s time to right the wrongs in our lives. Let’s put an end to daylight savings – and while we are at it haul down Cabot Tower!

Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com