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EDITORIAL: The living daylights

If you’re reading this editorial and feeling a bit out-of-sorts, you probably have daylight savings to thank. The official time to turn your clocks ahead an hour was 2 a.m. (or is that 1 a.m.?) Sunday morning.

If you’re reading this editorial and feeling a bit out-of-sorts, you probably have daylight savings to thank.

The official time to turn your clocks ahead an hour was 2 a.m. (or is that 1 a.m.?) Sunday morning.

Other than offering an extra hour in the pub on the second Saturday night in March, we’re at a loss trying to find any benefit to monkeying with our circadian rhythms in order to outwit the sun.

The agrarian practice of shifting our clocks an hour here or there to better align with farmers’ working day is a throwback and we’d argue it’s time to fast forward to the present on this.

Saskatchewan, the most agriculture-centred province in the country, doesn’t even bother with it anymore.

Benjamin Franklin was a big advocate of daylight savings, cheekily suggesting it would cut back on the use of candles, but more modern studies have shown it does little to reduce energy use – or may even increase it.

And we pay for our chronographic hubris with our health. Studies have linked daylight savings (both forward and back) with an increase in traffic accidents, workplace injuries, heart attacks and strokes. And hell hath no fury like a cat that perceives its breakfast is being served late.

Yes, leaving the office at 5 p.m. to glorious sunshine in mid-March is a nice thought, but most of our hemisphere remains cold and dreary this time of year regardless of the hour, and getting up in darkness is also unappealing.

There’s little agreement on the issue, even in the U.S. where the clock-switching scenarios tend to dictate our own.

It’s time we saw the light and left this semi-annual illogical ritual behind.

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