British Columbia Takes a Stand on Daylight Time

Kids jumping for joy at Eby's "Pacific time" announcement

Big news today for British Columbia -- this coming weekend we will change our clocks forward one hour permanently.

Premier David Eby announced the change, saying, "We are done waiting. British Columbia is going to change our clocks just one more time -- and then never again."

He is referring to the authorities on the west coast of the United States in Washington State, Oregon and California. Originally he had said he would wait for them to decide if they were going to stick with one or the other so that businesses would not be confused with times, but perhaps Eby was done waiting, or didn't hear back from them and decided BC was going its own way.

The new time zone will be called "Pacific time".

The entire province will be following Pacific time except for East Kootenay, which observes mountain time with Alberta.

Eby noted Yukon has already permanently changed to daylight time, and hopes the US will follow. Back in 2019 BC already passed legislation to make this possible, but just didn't have a specific timeline.

Interestingly American President Donald Trump had expressed interest in changing to daylight time after the 2024 election, Congress has not passed legislation for it.

So it will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months... there will surely be a lot of confusion on the west coast in terms of what time it is come November, but in the meantime many people are pleased that we'll have longer daylight hours and no more "jetlag" from springing ahead an hour after this weekend.

However, Eby's critics are crying foul because the announcement was suddenly made without much recent consultation; they believe it's a distraction from the horrible budget he delivered last week...