Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve heard this song and dance from me before, but let me indulge myself in a fit of pique once again.
Next Sunday, March 12, 2023, we once again spring forward into daylight saving time. And once again, we lose that precious hour of sleep.
Not only do we lose the hour, but we lose that morning sunlight that gives me a boost to start the day. Back to alarm going off in the dark for a few months.
Grumble, grumble, grumble.
I thought we made it perfectly clear that we have no interest in the time changes anymore. B.C. residents voted overwhelmingly (93 percent) to dump them. The provincial government of the day even passed legislation in 2019 that would make daylight saving time permanent.
But… there’s always a but, the government isn’t going ahead until Washington state, Oregon and California do the same.
Well they haven’t.
Here in the East Kootenay the sense among the muckety-mucks is that we shouldn’t do it until Alberta does.
Well, they haven’t either. Actually they held their own referendum and 50.2 per cent of the population voted to keep changing clocks. Geez, Alberta. How can an arbitrarily drawn line through the Rockies create such divergent opinions?
There was some good news last March as the Sunshine Protection Act (who comes up with these names?) which would abolish time changes across the United States, passed in the Senate.
But, and here’s a big one, it has yet to pass in the House. And given the current makeup of the house where Almost Wasn’t Speaker Kevin McCarthy made a Faustian bargain with the far, far right of his party to gain the gavel, I can’t see it passing. There are legislators in this congress who oppose bills just as a matter of course. Two congress-people actually voted against a resolution that called for mourning for the victims of the Syrian and Turkey earthquakes last week. Just because they could. They have a sixth sense for anything that might be supported by a Democrat and will simply not support it if so.
So yeah, the Sunshine Protection Act calls for all this to happen by November, ahead of the ‘fall back’, 2023. I’m not holding my breath. Congress has important investigations into Hunter Biden’s underpants to conduct. No time for something that millions of people want.
And they haven’t even begun to squabble about whether we should stay on standard time or daylight time. That’s a whole different argument.
Let me just say, I don’t care whether they pick standard or daylight time. I can adjust to either. Just pick one. As long as I don’t have to change the clock twice every year. Get on with it, people. Don’t make me write another column next year.