SASKATOON – Cows around Moosomin, beware.
Next spring the town may switch to daylight savings time, which, as one Alberta tale goes, “confuses the cows in Saskatchewan.”
“I think the cows could care less,” laughs Bernard Kirwan, president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM). He said the whole switch to daylight savings time began as an energy-saving means in the war. Now, he said, people like the longer evenings in summer for recreation.
But Don Bradley, mayor of Moosomin, said business is the main reason they want to switch.
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“With our eastern suppliers, the time difference is too much,” he said.
Moosomin is about 20 kilometres from the the Manitoba border. Because Saskatchewan stays on central standard time year-round, business hours in the summer fall an hour behind Manitoba towns.
In October the town council issued a proclamation asking residents to voluntarily switch to daylight savings time in April.
But according to provincial spokesman Lorne Tangjard, the Time Act passed in 1966 specifically states that all of Saskatchewan will remain on central standard time.
The exceptions to this are “time option areas” which fall west of the third meridian (around Caronport).
These time option areas, usually defined by school districts, can adopt daylight savings time by letting residents vote.
Tangjard said right now, the Lloydminster area is the only district that changes their clocks.
But Lorne Kachur, a businessman and town administrator in Marshall, 15 km southeast of Lloydminster, said the switch doesn’t make business any easier.
He said the time change does facilitate business with Alberta, but makes it difficult to do business in the rest of Saskatchewan.
“We had no choice. We had to accommodate the school division and the working people,” he said. If schools were on one time and businesses on another, it would be confusing.
This is precisely what happened before the Time Act was passed 27 years ago, said Tanjgard. He said towns literally picked their own time zones which led to “a hodgepodge of one town on this time and the next on another.” This in turn raised conflicts between towns.
Tanjgard said if Moosomin wants to change time zones, its best course of action is to take the matter to SARM or the the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association (SUMA), which could make recommendations to Carol Carson, the municipal government minister.
Ted Cholod, SUMA’s president, said the daylight savings issue is once again a resolution at this month’s annual meeting. It has been an issue eight times in the last 18 or 19 years.
Some people have argued that Saskatchewan is on daylight savings time permanently, and changing clocks actually makes it double daylight time, he said.
“If it comes to conversation, it will be a lively event, but if the comes back to the issue of ‘are we ahead on daylight savings time’, I don’t know what that will do for Moosomin.”
