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Tom Monto

Alberta 2021 vote on Daylight Savings Time -- both options lousy (Millwoods Mosaic article)

about Daylight Savings Time, I tried to show there are four options for Alberta,

four combinations of these two questions

seasonal clock-changing (DST) or not

and

Mountain Time or Central Time.

in 1971 we voted on DST/Mountain Time, or Mountain Time year-round.

in 2021 we voted on DST/Mountain Time or Central Time year-round.


it seems to me people might want Mountain Time year-round if they object to clock-changing

urban people want long evenings as long as morning commute is close to sunrise. so DST (or Mountain Time)

rural people do not care about long evenings so Mountain year round is fine for them

but neither want year-round Central Time I think.


article also covers referendums

and Alberta pension plan

wide ranging article!


===================================

We went off of Daylight Saving Time on Nov. 5. And now it gets dark at about 5 PM. Going on DST in the spring and off DST in the autumn means changing clocks and other inconveniences. The government held a referendum on the issue a couple years back. Alberta has not held very many referendums in its history. but now the government is talking again about holding a referendum, this time on a proposed Alberta Pension Plan.

Referendums are seen as a way to measure public opinion. But often a government uses them just to strengthen its own position or just ignores the result.

A planned referendum on Alberta pensions may be the same. Already the government is saying the result may not be binding on the government, just as happened in other referendums in Canadian history.

In 1897 a country-wide referendum was held on the question of Prohibition (restriction of the sale of booze). Overall most voted in favour but the federal government ignored the result. In part this was because most of Quebec were opposed to Prohibition.

Referendums with simple yes or no format are known to be instruments of majority power and repression of minority rights. But the minority sometimes wields significant power and can’t be ignored. Politics is politics, and there are no hard-and-fast rules.

The weakness of referendums was also seen concerning Daylight Saving Time.

During WWII Canada used DST (moving clocks one hour earlier in the summer months) as an energy-saving device. And that practice was continued in many places even after the war's end. But not in Alberta.

In 1946, Edmonton held a referendum to measure interest in once again adopting summer-time DST. 14,000 voted in favour, and 10,000 opposed. Edmonton actually did not have the power to bring in DST. But the following spring, Mayor Harry Ainlay (namesake of the high school near Southgate) and the city council voted to adopt DST in the city even if the surrounding countryside was not using it. Edmonton’s DST went into effect on April 27, 1947 and was in effect until September 27.

Alberta’s Social Credit government sputtered against this liberty and passed a law forbidding any Alberta municipality from adopting DST.

We skip ahead to 1967, 19 years later. The Social Credit government, still in power, finally decided to hold a province-wide vote on DST. By that time, the only other holdout, Saskatchewan, had adopted year-round DST, adopting Central Time with no seasonal clock change.

That choice was not offered to Alberta voters who had the choice of either DST in summer with standard Mountain Time in winter, or standard time all the time.

Alberta voters by a slight margin voted against summer-time DST. Most voters in Edmonton favoured DST – 65,000 to 58,000. So the law against DST stayed in effect, preventing Edmonton from getting what city voters wanted.

Those who wanted DST - the 49 percent of voters across Alberta and the majority in Edmonton - did not let the matter rest. They forced the government to allow another referendum simultaneous with the 1971 election. That election saw the 36-year-old Social Credit government turfed out and also saw a majority vote in favour of DST. The new Conservative government, elected mostly by urban voters, brought in DST in the summer months.

You might wonder why we change back to standard Mountain Time each autumn. For one thing, having DST in the winter months would mean on Christmas Day, just about the shortest day in the year, the sun would come up just before 10 AM. So if we want to use DST in the summer when we want extra long evenings and don't want the sun to rise at 10 AM in December, we have to change our clocks twice a year.

In other words due to DST we have more hours of sunlight in the evening in the summer, and when we go back to standard time as we did on November 5th, we have more hours of sunlight in the morning in the winter. In Edmonton, where days are only 7 hours long in December, it is important what time on the clock those few hours of daylight happen.

But now we face the situation where many places are using DST year-round, in other words moving to a time zone one hour east of their location and dropping the seasonal time change altogether. No need to change time, but it means the sun rises one hour later year round.

The UCP government, which replaced the NDP government that replaced the Conservative government that was first elected in 1971, decided to hold a referendum on following that example. A referendum was thought to be necessary as a referendum had been held before adopting the present DST scheme back in 1972. A policy brought in by referendum is sometimes thought to be more sacred than a policy passed just by the elected members. But not always. (And the reverse is obviously not true - the present election system was never approved by referendum but many think a referendum is required before we can change it.)

In the 2021 vote, year-round DST was voted down. If the government had offered year-round standard time, the change might have passed. Who likes changing clocks twice a year? But who wants sunrise at 10 AM either?

This shows how a yes or no vote in a referendum means there are only two options offered. But an issue is usually more than just yes or no. We elect representatives and they engage in discussion because often the devil is in the details.

As well, referendums can be empty exercises, with the government not doing what voters want anyway. We see this with BC's 2005 referendum on changing the voting system. A majority of voters voted for proportional representation (STV), but the government set aside the result.

And also a government can, if the result is not to the government's liking, put the question to the voters again and again until it gets the answer it wants.

We saw this with the city vote on the downtown Blatchford Airport. In 1992 voters said keep the airport open. But the question was put again only three years later, and that time the voters voted the other way. City council quickly moved on this hoped-for outcome.

Besides the recent clock-change, the topic of referendums comes up as the Alberta government is talking seriously about holding a referendum on forcing people to drop out of the Canadian Pension Plan and be switched to a new Alberta pension plan. Billions of dollars of workers’ savings are up for grabs.

The government is saying it wants to know what voters think. However, the government is also saying the referendum may not be binding. So it seems when the government learns what people think, it may do something else anyway.

But the bottom line is that many workers have for decades had money deducted from their pay to go to the Canadian plan on the promise of pension payouts from the plan. To me it seems to be immoral for the Alberta government to interfere with that long-standing relationship.

If the Alberta government wants to create an Alberta pension plan, like Saskatchewan has for homemakers who choose to voluntarily join, then fine.

Or if it wants to prevent Albertans from using the CPP in the future, then perhaps that is defensible.

But to say that past contributions paid to CPP must be transferred to an Alberta pension plan seems almost criminal. Was not the Mafia renowned for buying industrial operations or taking over unions and then plundering the workers’ pension plan?

it should be the choice of each individual worker whether or not to switch to an Alberta plan and not something rammed down a worker's throat, whichever way the vote goes. Individuals should have rights, and something as important as a person’s pension should be left to the individual to decide for him or herself.

If our premier is really the champion of individual freedoms that she says she is, she really should see this.

==========


originally published as an article in the Millwoods Mosaic November 2023

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