B.C. is ending the practice of changing the clocks for daylight saving time, opting to stay on summer time in perpetuity.
“This decision isn’t just about clocks,” Premier David Eby said in a written statement. “It’s about making life easier for families, reducing disruptions for businesses and supporting a stable, thriving economy.”
This means that when the clocks spring forward on the morning of March 8, they will stay that way forever. Technically, daylight saving time will not end in B.C. — it will be made permanent.
A new time zone will also be created, seven hours behind Coordinated Universal Time and called “Pacific Time.”
Parts of B.C. currently on Pacific Standard Time will all make the change, but for those using Mountain Standard Time, it is a bit more complicated. Some northeastern parts of the province stay on Mountain Standard Time all year, and will now observe the same time as the rest of B.C.
The Golden region and parts of the Kootenays use the same time as Alberta, observing Mountain Standard Time in the winter and Mountain Daylight Time in the summer, along with that province. Those areas will continue on this system, meaning they will be on the same time as B.C. in the winter, but an hour ahead in the summer.
Eby has long championed ending the biannual clock change, and the B.C. legislature passed a bill in 2019 to allow the change. At the time, the government said it would only do so in alignment with the U.S. West Coast states, so people would not be required to change their clocks when entering Washington.
But that bill allows the changes to be implemented without any further legislation either way, and the government has opted to stop waiting.
This calculus began to change when U.S. President Donald Trump began his trade wars.
“The original reason for being reluctant to change to wait for the United States, given their importance as a trading partner, etc., has reduced in importance, and I think it may be important for us to go our own way,” Eby told Black Press Media in December.
Still, Eby expressed some reluctance at that time.
“I’m pretty anxious about what it would actually look like on the ground and whether people would actually like it once we had it,” he said.
More to come.