It’s that time of year: Daylight saving time begins this weekend

It’s that time of year again: daylight saving time begins this weekend.

An hour of sleep is lost, but good news – the sun sets later, meaning spring is around the corner.

So don’t forget that at 2 a.m. on Sunday, clocks move ahead one hour.

In Canada, daylight saving time (DST) is turning clocks ahead one hour on the second Sunday in March then on the first Sunday in November, the time it turned back one hour.

Not all are in favour of changing the time twice a year.

There was an Alberta referendum in 2021 where just over half of people voted to continue changing clocks twice a year.

In Ontario, the province passed a bill in 2020 to permanently remain on DST but it would only come into effect if both Quebec and the New York state also pass similar legislation.

In October 2024, the Quebec government announced a public consultation that lasted until Dec. 1, saying they wanted to hear from Quebecers about the possibility of scrapping the twice-yearly time change. 

The government could then table legislation to abolish the practice, but they didn’t say whether the province would prefer to scrap daylight time or make it permanent. 

“Our sleep and our well-being is managed partly by a biological clock,” Roger Godbout, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal, had told CityNews in an interview. “This biological clock is setting itself each morning with exposure to light. If you change the timing of exposure to light, this will perturb the whole organization of hormone secretion, cardiovascular functions, mood, especially during the fall season, where the mood is something a bit low in some person.”

Godbout said that the reasons why the time change was first implemented over 100 years ago, no longer stands.

“It’s becoming a problem because from what I understand, the reasons for changing twice a year, the time was a matter of energy, resources, management, mainly during wartime. This is not such an issue nowadays. We sense that the science of sleep has grown tremendously since the last 75 years. We now know that this is a bad thing to do.”

Godbout added that for some, time changes can take a person a few days to get used to it, while others are quicker.

Most of Canada is on DST — only parts of Saskatchewan and areas in British Columbia remain on Standard Time year-round. Yukon made DST permanent in 2020.

—With files from The Canadian Press and CityNews Staff