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Ontario to Match U.S. DST Change

Devastator writes "CBC is reporting that Ontario will be the first Canadian province to change daylight savings rules to reflect the changes happening in the U.S in 2007. Attorney General Michael Bryant says 'the province's economy was the deciding factor and that if Ontario isn't on the same time as the United States, it will be hurt financially.'"

13 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. Sleeping with an Elephant by dso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This seems to be a typical Canada/US relation. It's like the old saying goes:

    "When you sleep with an elephant, if it rolls, you roll."

  2. Re:Great idea for here! by Engineer+Andy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i live in queensland, and despite a great deal of business being done with the southern states, you wont get the farmers or hicks in the backwaters dealing with changing their clocks twice a year. Having the sun get up at 4-30am is not as useful to 99% of the people as having a few hours to do stuff in the evening after work. WTF is with getting home from work at 6pm and it being dark?

    there is an e-petition being circulated at the moment at
    http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/EPetitions_QLD/cg i-bin/Petitions.cgi?PetNum=553
    to try and get rid of this nonsense.

    --
    "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
  3. Re:Imagine a government so powerful.. by ScoLgo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No. I think he got it right. Not whoa, but woe. As in, "Woe to you, oh Earth and Sea. For the Devil sends the Beast with wrath. Because he knows the time is short - so he changed DST to compensate."

    (Score:-1, Poor Iron Maiden Reference)

    --
    "Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
  4. Why not UTC? by vertinox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It would make things simple and just go by UTC. So when we mean we are going to have a meeting in New York at 15:00, we mean we are going to have a meeting in California at 15:00.

    You make the time different based on what you are and work around the time... No the other way around. I wake up at 13:00 and you can wake up at 18:00 whever you may be. It would save the trouble of having to talk with other people in other time zones and always manually adjust the time.

    --
    "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
    -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
  5. Re:This is really stupid by fm6 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Last time I checked, both Canada and the US did trade with countries other than each other.
    So what? The U.S. is not just another trading partner for Canada. The U.S. buys 85% of Canada's exports! And exports account for one-third of the Canadian economy. Do the math: for every dollar earned by a Canadian, 28 cents comes from selling stuff to the U.S.
    Hell, there's a 3h discepancy between here (BC) and Ontario, and I live in the same country.
    Again, so what? Ontario and New York State may be in different countries — but I'll bet that New York is a lot more important to the Ontarian economy than British Columbia.

    Scenario: one fine summer morning a factory in upstate New York runs out of left handed blivets. There's a blivet warehouse across the border in Ontario, and there's another one further south. The Canadian warehouse offers a better price because of the weak Canadian dollar (I hear its not so weak these days, but this is a scenario) so the factory calls them first. No answer — it's an hour earlier in Ontario, so the warehouse office is closed. Guess who gets the order?

  6. Re:Nice move Bush.... Idiot! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Airlines and other businesses that depend on time are going to have to reprogram many things, and thus this will impact their bottom line. [Is this a good thing when so many are going bankrupt?]

    Being in airline IT, I can tell you that the changes to our systems have almost zero cost. Being an international carrier, we deal with time rule changes just about every month. We know how to handle these changes with ease. Just because this one happens in the US doesn't make it any different.

    Airlines WANT to declare bankruptcy. Airlines are going bankrupt because corporate laws are such that declaring bankruptcy results in the airline not having to pay money to those people it owe, and results in the cancellation of existing contracts.

  7. Excellent by BeerMilkshake · · Score: 3, Interesting
    With Ontario making the announcement, other provinces will follow, including the one I live in.

    Why is this great news? Because of all the software maintenance effort that will be required to upgrade the systems to comply. The additional workload will mean more money and maybe even a recovery in the job market after the tech bubble a few years back.

    This is the one thing GWB has done that will benefit me. Thanks George!

  8. Re:This is really stupid by 1u3hr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Could someone explain how "Arkansas" is apparently pronounced "Arkinsaw"? I assumed they were two different states till recently.

  9. Re:This is really stupid by NutscrapeSucks · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > we have no problems trading with them.

    I dunno, I used to work for a company that was HQ'd in Arizona, with their flat-earth policy towards DST, we would routinely miss phone conferences. (The crappy scheduling system that only showed original timezones didn't help.) Cow-orks tell horror stories about working at companies located around Indiana. At least we will all be able to easily figure out what time it is in Ontario.

    --
    Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
  10. Bring me back night sky! by YGingras · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The summer night is already so short. By artificially moving sun set later you have to be pretty damn motivated if you want to look at the stars. But looking at the stars is something free, something that doesn't require energy and something that anyone will enjoy if they have an opportunity to see them. Instead, we only see the sun in the evening. So every one just sit inside, with the lights on, just because they see better that way, event if the sun is still high and they watch TV because they have nothing better to do.

    Wanna save energy? Why don't you shutdown or at least dim all those fscking lamp posts after the rush hour? Do we really need to light up the streets so bright that at in any large enough city (and you know its not that large) the night sky looks like dawn all night long. Just try it, stop reading /. and go outside. Mars is in opposition and we are in the peak of the Orionids meteor shower. There is quite a show going on and its not too cold yet to stay hours laying on the ground.

  11. Standard vs Daylight Savings Time? by duncf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Anyone else find it a bit unusual that "Standard Time" will now only be observed for 3 months of the year, while "Daylight Savings Time" will be observed for 9 months?

    Maybe they should change the names, so we have "Standard Time" in the summer... and "Night Savings Time" in the winter?

  12. Re:It's to save energy you insensitive clod! by Geeky · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I read somewhere that making street lights less bright actually helps to reduce crime. The logic was that very bright street lighting increases contrast between the areas nearest the lights and the gaps between them. This means that our eyes don't adjust to the darkness so well, and creates shadows in which the criminals can lurk.

    By reducing the brightness of the streetlights, our eyes are adjusted to the lower light levels and so we can see better into the unlit shadows; hence making it harder for the criminals to lurk unseen.

    Although this was borne out by a study (somewhere in Arizona? Can't find a link handy), Joe Public didn't understand and demanded their brighter lights back. The purpose of the study was to investigate ways to reduce energy use, but lower light pollution is an obvious side benefit.

    --
    Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
  13. Re:This is the best the magic wand can do by CKW · · Score: 2, Interesting

    .

    I live in an apartment in the heart of the 5th biggest city in North America. I walk to work. I've made choices in my life that allow me to do this.

    I wish I could buy an affordable house *and* walk to work. But the only affordable houses are 1 - 1.5 hours commute from here. Which sucks the big one. Who the hell wants to spend 2-3 hours a day commuting. But tons and tons of people do so, because they want a) a house, and b) a job they like.

    But what forces companies to have their headquarters in the core of big-ass cities where they are "hard" to get to? Okay it's a natural progression from the olden days when cities weren't that dense, and you'd want to be near other businesses. But that was before telephones, before VOIP and $40 web-phones and modern systems. Right now most companies need to be in expensive centrally located cities like they need a hole in their head. My company's people spend 99% of their time dealing with people THOUSANDS of miles away. We sell our product WORLDWIDE, if sales reps or SE's want to see the customer, they have to get on airplanes.

    The company could *easily* move the location 50 miles north, to a place where tons of us employees could get a nice affordable house within a 15 mile radius and only have a 20 minute commute to work. I think lots of companies could do this.

    Funny thing is the provincial body that oversees development (reviews and hears objections to city zoning plans/rules) has been given the mission of "intensifying" the cities. I betcha that is FOR business, not at all in the interests of the general citizenry. Apartments in central Vancouver are getting as small as 300 square feet. That's not living space. That's a dog cage. That's not acceptable. I do not want to live my life in an apartment.

    Yes yes you're worried about "urban sprawl". First of all as soon as the rest of the world gets itself worked up to 1st world status - the birth rates should level out to the point where sprawl will stop - because there won't be "more and more" people. And in any case the only reason people don't like "sprawl" is because it creates choked roads, because people can't buy a house close to work, because work is in the core of an ultra expensive city core. See where I'm going? That leads me to the only other reason people "don't like sprawl" - becuase the sprawl is concentrated around single areas, so you end up with 200 miles of concrete. If the sprawl was broken up with places of work distributed around - same land area, a house for everyone instead of apartments - just not all together, no one would care.

    Take a look at a map of a place like Ontario. The sprawl is concentrated to within 40 miles of Lake Ontario. Northern Ontario is EMPTY. Okay it's a bit colder there. But it's no further north than a lot of the rest of Canada, and still further south than places like Sweden and Norway.

    So - how the hell do we convince companies to start spreading out their sites a bit better? So we can all live in houses in nice little 50-250,000 person cities surrounded by countryside?

    I guess the only real method we have of doing that - is to move. We go there and maybe the jobs will follow? Okay maybe you'll have to take a pay cut and get a job in a slightly different industry - but at least you'll be able to afford a house.

    Either that or start talking about it with everyone that will listen, and maybe someday an exec will follow through.

    .