Saturday, March 7, 2020 ~ VICTORIA, BC
~ West Shore Voice News
Before bed tonight Saturday March 7 (or on Sunday morning March 8 if you are a night owl), you will see automated clocks on computers and phones move forward one hour.
If you have some old clocks in your world — such as on ovens, traditional alarm clocks, or in an older car — you will need to manually adjust the time forward by one hour.
The annual ‘spring forward’ means that sunrise and sunset will be about 1 hour later on Mar 8, 2019 than they were the day before. This makes for longer evenings that are helpful for community recreation.
We’ll be turning our clocks back to Pacific Standard Time on November 1, 2020 to usher in the darker winter days of this year.
Last year, Premier John Horgan showed an interest in BC lining up with the time schedules of California, Oregon and Washington State to the south of BC. That’s for the business-world and travel alignment benefits. At a Victoria Chamber of Commerce luncheon in February 2019, the Premier identified that the economy of BC plus those three US states combined represent one-fifth of the world’s economy.
Daylight Savings Time was first adopted in Canada (in Ontario) in 1908. Sir Sandford Fleming — a Scottish-born civil engineer and scientist who made his mark in Canada based in Halifax, came up with the daylight savings time idea due to his observations of then-new railway travel making it possible for people to be in different local astronomical conditions. He advocated the adoption of a standard, or mean, time with hourly variations from it according to a system of time zones. The system has since been adopted pretty-much worldwide, with exceptions.
In Canada at present, Saskatchewan does not practice Daylight Savings Time (remaining on Central Standard Time year-round), as well as a few small towns in BC and Ontario.
Starting in 2007, clocks following the new North American standard for Daylight Saving Time began being turned forward by one hour on the second Sunday in March and turned back on the first Sunday of November. In years previous to that, the forward-date was later in the spring.
The idea of providing more evening daylight was to contribute to energy savings (more hours of natural daylight) and provide more daylight hours for outdoor activities.
Daylight saving time lasts for a total of 34 weeks (238 days) every year, about 65% of the entire year.
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