Residents of British Columbia will change their clocks this weekend as daylight saving time shifts into place and then will never do so again.
The Canadian province is permanently adopting the new clock, officials announced on Monday, ending the twice-a-year ritual of changing every device and clock you own.
The new time zone, which will go in effect on Sunday and is called Pacific Time, places the province in line with the Yukon Territory, which stopped changing its clocks in 2020, officials said in a statement shared on social media.
Pacific Time will be “aligned with Alberta and other regions on Mountain Standard Time in the winter, and with California, Washington, Oregon and other Pacific Standard Time regions the rest of the year,” officials said.
David Eby, the premier of British Columbia, said during an appearance announcing the new time zone that springing forward and falling back “creates all kinds of problems.”
“Every parent knows that changing clocks twice a year causes a significant amount of chaos on already busy lives,” he said, adding that “British Columbians have been clear that seasonal time changes do not work for them.”
A 2019 public survey in the province found that 93 percent out of “a record 223,000 people” polled supported year-round daylight saving time, according to officials, and “across all industry groups and nearly all occupational groups, support for year-round D.S.T. observance was higher than 90 percent.”
Officials also said in a statement that “evidence suggests there are many benefits to ending the seasonal time change,” including better consistency for sleep patterns and daily routines as well as more sunlight during winter evenings.
“This decision isn’t just about clocks,” Mr. Eby said. “It’s about making life easier for families, reducing disruptions for businesses and supporting a stable, thriving economy.”
On social media where the provincial government shared the news, people reacted with a mix of excitement and horror as some realized this meant darker mornings during the winter.
“People have different preferences regarding whether they want that potential extra hour of light in the morning or evening, and each has its own benefits backed by research,” the government’s official Facebook page responded, pointing to the 2019 survey as the reasoning for settling on daylight saving time and not standard time.
Most countries don’t change their clocks, according to the Pew Research Center. Only about a third of the world’s countries practice daylight saving time, with the vast majority of them in Europe, Pew found.
Scientists generally prefer a permanent switch to standard time (the time in winter) rather than daylight saving time (the time in summer).
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine called for the abolition of daylight saving time in 2020, saying that by disrupting the body’s natural clock, the shifts could cause an increased risk of stroke and cardiovascular events, and could lead to more traffic accidents.
In the United States, where President Trump has previously expressed support for year-round daylight saving time, legislation making that change has made slow but steady progress. In March 2022, the Senate suddenly and unanimously passed legislation to make daylight saving time permanent. But the bill failed to make it out of the House. Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, reintroduced the bill in January 2025.
Daylight saving time in the United States is a holdover from 1918, when the country lost its first hour of sleep, but its origins are said to go back to Benjamin Franklin, who realized he was wasting his Parisian mornings by staying in bed. He proposed that the French fire cannons at sunrise to wake people up and reduce candle consumption at night.
Aimee Ortiz covers breaking news and other topics.
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