Aside, whatever political party calls for ending the time changes and switching to permanent DST gets my vote. My kids are positively feral for the week after a time change.
Newly appointed NDP premier in BC last week just brought it up again.
While I don't agree with current party in power, I would vote for them if they did actually remove the annual time change.
Personally I don't care when the sun comes up, and same for most people I know. I begin any day between 5AM-830 AM randomly.
I sleep with blackout curtains, the sun is not a factor with my sleep really.
I am sure waking kids while it's dark out is rough, but they will adapt...
This already happens in the winter months when sunrise may not occur before ~7:45AM in BC
One, it will mean getting too early for school. Children already get up too early for effective learning and now we'll ask them to get up even earlier year-round, plus they'll have to go to school in the dark in winter.
Second, I do find it hard to get up at 7am in the summer, i.e. 6am astronomical time. Businesses would probably not switch to a 10am starting time, so it's best we keep 9am being 9am, rather than 8am.
Third, it will mean more people going to work in the dark in winter, increasing road accidents.
You can probably find many more arguments against permanent DST. Of the several nations that do not observe DST, none are on permanent DST. Russia used to be on permanent DST when they abolished it in 2011, but they moved clocks back in 2014 and they've remained there ever since. A strong motivating factor was that people had to get up too early, when it was still dark [0].
It seems to be easier to simply observe astronomical time, to which our traditional business and school schedules were set, with specific businesses starting earlier per their needs, than to observe permanent DST.
They don't seem in a rush to change.
Edit: on the solstice, sunrise is just before 9am in Regina.
Deciding what time school starts is completely orthogonal to deciding what to call that time.
Shifting the schedule of everything by an hour twice a year is unnecessarily disruptive. If you want school to start later (which I totally support BTW) the right answer is not to abolish DST but to lobby your school board to change the school schedule.
I do not find that article very persuasive. It compares the ease in the current system of knowing if it is a good time to call your Uncle in Melbourne to the purported difficulty of doing so if we have a single worldwide timezone, but I think it greatly overstates the difficulty.
In fact, you use exactly the same procedure in both systems. It's just that a couple of the values are interpreted differently.
0. In both systems you have to know that Melbourne is about N hours ahead of you due to the longitude difference.
1. Let C1 = your clock time.
2. Let C2 = C1 + N
3. Is it a good time to receive calls AT YOUR LOCATION when your clock time is C2?
4. If yes, call your Uncle.
In the multi-zone system, C2 is the current clock time at your Uncle's location. Clock time approximates local time in this system, so you need to figure out if that local time is a good time to call. In step #3 you take advantage of your knowledge that schedules in local time are approximately the same in Melbourne as they are in most other cities, including yours, so you can use your experience with your local time.
In the single worldwide zone system, it still works. C1 is now the clock time at both your place and your Uncle's place (and everywhere else). C2 is now approximately the clock time when your local time will be what your Uncle's local time is right now. In other words C1 at your Uncle's place is like C2 at your place.
There are good arguments for keeping time zones, but ease of figuring out if calling someone far east or west of you is going to wake them up is not one of them.
Which would mean it would be dark when school starts. It's hard enough to get them out the door on time as is. I fully support getting rid of the time change, but not by making DST permanent.
If you start school later then households where all parents are employed and the children are not old enough to handle getting ready and out the door in the morning on their own might need to have their work schedule pushed back.
If work schedules in general then get pushed back to accommodate the school schedule change, pretty much everything else follows because work is such a big and inflexible block of time on most people's schedules nearly everything else has to schedule around it.
I took the bus to school, on my own, since day two of primary school. It wasn't hard, and I don't recall anyone ever getting lost. Even if they had, it's not the end of the world; they'll find their way back eventually.
It's a peculiar American-ism to assume that children are incapable of handling themselves, and one that's been repeatedly proven false.
That and other related/similar societal changes have me scared of having children. I would get locked up for spanking my kids' butt or letting them play outside or something like that.
From about nine on, I used to beg to be allowed to sit in the car and read instead of getting dragged along through stores.
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/mobile/dad-told-children-too-young-to-r...
Children are not simply small humans, differing from adults only in size. There are significant cognitive differences between very young children and adult humans. They are not fully developed cognitively until the early 20s.
In particular, young children are not good at time management, balancing current actions against future consequences, anticipating and planning for how things could go wrong, and setting priorities.
Also, wake up lights.
Anecdotally, when I moved my clothes into the guest room and got ready for the day with all the lights on instead of getting dressed by nightlight, I was much more wakeful. Also made fewer errors with navy/black socks :)
1. https://www.philips.com.au/c-m-li/choose-a-bulb/sceneswitch
The standard tech schedule of ten to seven is insane IMO. Construction workers have it figured out, they work seven to three.
And that's if you get out of work at 5 every day. Lots of us get out later (say, 6 or 6:30) and then have at least a half hour commute.
The only time I see the sun in winter is in the morning. With daylight savings in effect I lose that too. Those extra few weeks they tacked onto daylight savings at the end of October are dark and brutal.