Time to reflect

It’s days like this you really wonder whether Danny Williams was really just joking about abolishing the House of Assembly.

Why bother? Not when you can get unanimous consent to pass a bill at First, Second, and Third Reading, almost at a shot, like what happened with Bill 34 on Tuesday afternoon.

It’s surprising Ed wasn’t put on standby to give it Royal Assent, too.

What’s Bill 34, you (both of you) are asking?

It’s the Act that brings Newfoundland and Labrador in line with George Bush’s ill-conceived idea to extend daylight savings time. “Ill-conceived”, because no one – certainly not the House of Assembly of a province whose populated ecumene extends to north of 56° – has meaningfully considered the impact of this move in higher latitudes. In Tuesday’s debate only Randy Collins provided even a token attempt at analyzing the bill’s effect.

Which is? Well, that’s complicated.

At present, when November rolls around, the clocks have already moved back to standard time. Notwithstanding the Standard Time Act, the majority of Labrador’s population and landmass – indeed, the majority of the provincial landmass – observes Atlantic, not Newfoundland Time.

(The power exists within the Act to vary local time observance by regulation; this power does not, however, seem to have been invoked in the case of Labrador, where people have voted with their clocks.)

On November 1, the sun rises in Labrador at 7:00 a.m., give or take a few minutes depending on latitude or longitude. In late fall, winter, and early spring, the higher the latitude, the shorter the day, and the later and earlier, by local solar time, that the sun rises and sets respectively. Longitudinally, a location further west in a time zone may still be in darkness while a location to the east, but within the same time zone, has already observed local sunrise.

An extreme example will illustrate. Take Eastern Time, observed in Canada ,at least in summer, as far east as Blanc-Sablon on the Labrador border, and as far west as Thunder Bay, Ontario. Obviously, the sun rises in Blanc-Sablon before it does in Thunder Bay, Blanc-Sablon being 1438 miles, as the crow flies, to the east. So, on, say, June 1st, the sun rises at 3:40 a.m., local (Atlantic Standard/Eastern Daylight) time in Blanc-Sablon, while in Thunder Bay, running on the same clock, the sun does not appear until 5:59 a.m.

This problem is especially acute in China, which despite extending longitudinally east-west far enough to justify at least three, and possibly four time zones, the central government has mandated that the entire country run on Beijing time. Obviously, in a country that stretches north-south from the latitude of Jamaica to that of Labrador City, and east-west as far as St. John’s is from Regina, there is ample room for perverse results and inconvenience. In the Chinese far west, children go to school, and workers to their jobs, in the dark.

To help illustrate the local situation, this figure shows the terminator (the division between the dark and sunlit hemispheres of the earth) as it would be on an early November morning. The red line is the boundary between the observation of Newfoundland Time and Atlantic Time. (Other time zone boundaries are not shown.)


You can see that at a moment when Newfoundland and eastern Labrador will have already greeted the morning, northern and western Labrador will still be waiting for the sun to rise. While not as extreme as the impact of the ludicrous 1980s experiment with Double Daylight Saving Time, the effect will still be that the morning pre-dawn hours will still extend up to, and even after, 8:00 a.m. On November 1, sunrise in St. John’s will be at 7:43 a.m. In Cartwright, it will be 7:48. In Rigolet, 7:55, Goose Bay 8:00, Mary’s Harbour 8:09, Port aux Basques 8:10, L’anse au Clair 8:11, Nain and Churchill Falls 8:16, and Wabush, where the combined effect of latitude and longitude is most severe, 8:25.

Similar late sunrises will also be experienced in early November throughout the provincial and territorial north in Canada, especially in communities near the western edge of their time zones, such as northwestern Ontario and the Peace River country of northwestern Alberta.

It may not be the biggest problem in the province. But it did deserve greater consideration than a throw-away press release last spring, and a rubber-stamp “debate” in the fall.

If the province really wants us to consider time-zone issues, perhaps it’s time – pun intended – to give serious consideration to abolishing the anachronistic and astronomically unjustified half-hour Newfoundland time zone. All one province, right?

Quick, before Danny’s dream of abolishing the legislature, for whatever difference that would (or would not) make, comes to reality.