
This weekend the rest of the country will change clocks as Daylight Saving Time begins. To us in Saskatchewan this means our favourite TV shows on cable and satellite will be on one hour earlier.
The debate continues as to whether or not Saskatchewan should change time too. Some people feel very strongly about the issue (check out Willy Cole’s blog, for example), while I really don’t care either way. I found this out while living in BC a few years back and found changing my clock to be a rather minor incovenience.
Having a curious mind, I did a little reasearch on the history of Daylight Saving Time and would like to share with you an interesting write up on time change history:
Although first instituted in 1915, the idea of daylight time had been batted around for a more than a century. Benjamin Franklin suggested the idea more than once in the 1770s while he was an emissary to France. But it wasn’t until more than a century later that the idea of daylight time was taken seriously.
William Willett, an English builder, revived the idea in 1907, and eight years later Germany was the first nation to adopt daylight time. The reason: energy conservation. Britain quickly followed suit and instituted British Summer Time in 1916.
Several areas, including parts of Europe, Canada and the United States, followed suit during the First World War. In most cases, daylight time ended with the armistice.
During the Second World War, a different form of daylight time was reinstated by Britain and clocks were set two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time during the summer. It was known as Double Summer Time. The time shift didn’t end with the summer, as clocks were rolled back to be one hour ahead of GMT through the winter.
The Uniform Time Act, enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1966, established a system of uniform (within each time zone) daylight time throughout most of the U.S. and its possessions, exempting only those states in which the legislatures voted to keep the entire state on standard time.
In Canada, it’s up to each province to decide whether to use daylight time, and not all do. As of 2007, most jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S. have been moving their clocks ahead by one hour on the second Sunday in March and back by one hour on the first Sunday in November.
Most of Saskatchewan has not observed daylight time since 1966 and stays on Central Standard Time all year round. Some border towns follow the time schemes of their neighbours in Manitoba or Alberta.
As the late Paul Harvey would say “and now you know the rest of the story.”
(Article source: cbc.ca)