Daylight Savings Time Ends This Sunday – Fall Back One Hour!

Brockville – Daylight savings time 2023 will come to an end this Sunday, November 5th.

Clocks fall back one hour and it is also a good time to change your smoke/CO Alarm batteries!

In November 2020, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario passed Bill 214, the Time Amendment Act, 2020, which will establish year-round observation of daylight saving time; however, the act does not come into force immediately; instead, it takes effect on a day-to-be named by proclamation of the Ontario lieutenant governor under the advisory of the province’s attorney general. This is intended to avoid moving to a different time zone than that used in Quebec or New York

Daylight saving time (DST) is observed in nine of the country’s ten provinces and two of its three territories—though with exceptions in parts of several provinces and Nunavut.

Under the Canadian Constitution, laws related to timekeeping are a provincial and territorial matter. Most of Saskatchewan, despite geographically being in the Mountain Time Zone, observes year-round Central Standard Time (CST). In 2020, the Yukon Territory abandoned seasonal time change to permanently observe year-round Mountain Standard Time (MST).

In the regions of Canada where daylight saving time is used, it begins on the second Sunday of March at 2 a.m. and ends on the first Sunday in November at 2 a.m. As a result, daylight saving time lasts in Canada for a total of 34 weeks (238 days) every year, or about 65 percent of the entire year.

Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada, was the first city in the world to enact DST, on 1 July 1908. This was followed by Orillia, Ontario, introduced by William Sword Frost while mayor from 1911 to 1912.

Starting on 30 April 1916, the German Empire and Austria-Hungary each organized the first nationwide implementation in their jurisdictions.

Many countries have used DST at various times since then, particularly since the 1970s energy crisis. DST is generally not observed near the Equator, where sunrise and sunset times do not vary enough to justify it.

Some countries observe it only in some regions: for example, parts of Australia observe it, while other parts do not. Conversely, it is not observed at some places at high latitudes, because there are wide variations in sunrise and sunset times and a one-hour shift would relatively not make much difference at all.

DST was first implemented in the US with the Standard Time Act of 1918, a wartime measure for seven months during World War I in the interest of adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources. Year-round DST, or “War Time”, was implemented again during World War II. After the war, local jurisdictions were free to choose if and when to observe DST until the Uniform Time Act which standardized DST in 1966. Permanent daylight saving time was enacted in the winter of 1974, but there were complaints of children going to school in the dark and working people commuting and starting their work day in pitch darkness during the winter months, and it was repealed a year later.