In Europe, Budapest, Berlin, Paris and Madrid have been in the same time zone for over 80 years. The day in Paris is currently shifted by almost an hour compared to Berlin. If the time shift has serious implications, then it ought to be possible to demonstrate them by comparing Paris and Berlin.

Of course, it is perfectly fine to prefer one time or another. But I do not find the claims of health and safety impacts very convincing, given that many places are already shifted today.

Spain has long been suspected to suffer from their timezone choice. I do remember reading about that problem before, and a fast Google search finds several articles discussing the issue. (For example https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/22/spania...)

Up to a certain point, countries adapt. For example, Germany and France are in the same timezone, but their schedule is shifted. This can be easily seen when looking at the TV schedules. In Germany, evening TV starts at 20:15 (the start of movies, ...). In France it's more like 21:00. When I lived there it was 20:50, but TF1 now seems to start at 21:05.

German TV: https://www.zdf.de/live-tv

French TV: https://www.programme-tv.net/programme/chaine/programme-tf1-...

Similarly, schools and kindergardens are usually not at the same time.

This local shifting works more or less, but can't be stretched too far. Especially multinational companies have expectations that workers come in at certain times. This is the problem that Spain faces. (I couldn't easily check by how much Spanish are shifted as Spanish TV schedules don't seem to coordinated like in France or Germany).

Spain is, however, thought to be 2hrs 30mins ahead of "sun" time, not a mere one hour we're talking about here.

> thought to be 2hrs 30mins ahead of "sun" time

Spain is certainly ahead by a lot, but the 2:30 is for Galicia which is the westernmost tip of Spain (which is on the same longitude as Portugal, which is in a different time Zone).

For most of Spain it’s less, tough still a lot.

Here is a great map [1] that shows how much each place is offset vs solar time.

Spain is shifted pretty far, but some places are even further offset. Large parts of Russia and China, but also Alaska and Argentina.

Also, since the OP concerns Canada, worth noting that the map shows Canada being more shifted than the US, which I didn’t expect.

[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-wrong-is-your-time-zone-15285708...

Not to mention that Daylight Savings was invented during the first world war (while accurate timekeeping was invented several centuries earlier), and most of Asia and Africa do not follow it. I am incredibly skeptical of claims that Daylight Savings is the sole reason for some health effects, purely because Daylight Savings is an outlier in our history of timekeeping and is not universal today.

Is that because Africa is equatorial? Day length and Sun rise/set times don't change much over the year right?

No, Africa extends between 30 south and 30 north, roughly. Same latitude as the south of the US.

The US also has a North. Most people in the US are above 30 North, and daylight saving is pointless in the south.

The letter doesn't argue against eliminating the annual time shift, it argues for using Standard Time rather than Daylight Savings Time for the permanent time.

Is there even a meaningful difference in the long term? Starting times for school and work are not set in stone, but are different in different industries/regions, and constantly changing. If the government declared by fiat that the official clocks would jump ahead by 4 hours (thereby setting "11am" to be sunrise on June 1st, or whatever), everyone would eventually just adjust their schedules so that work started at "1pm", dinner time was about "11pm", etc.

The current daylight saving time standard, where we switch time twice a year by an hour, is not meaningless in the same way because schedules are "sticky" on sub-6-month timescales; a business keeps opening at 9am both before and after the clocks change in the Fall.

I think culture is more resistant to change than you realize. I would very much predict that for most of my lifetime, businesses will continue to open at 9am regardless of whether we decide to permanently shift the clocks forward or permanently shift them back. Nine o'clock is the number burned into people's brains.

And the rest of culture more or less follows that one start time.

Walking around a city today, I saw a bunch of different shop opening times, from 7am to 11am in half hour increments. I don't think 9am is that important.

It's actually more like two hours. In the east of CET you have Niš, Serbia, which has daylight hours of 06:08 - 16:23. In the west you have Pontevedra, Spain with daylight hours of 08:02 - 18:26. Both cities are close to the same latitude.

So I wonder if society (business, education, organizations) operates on the same schedule in Paris and Berlin? (or between Madrid and Budapest)

I suspect there's at least some adjustment, which indeed could negate health effects even if they existed (provided the operational adjustment exactly equals their time offset). OTOH If adjustment is incomplete or there's some numerical attachment (universal preference to start at specific hours), then effects could be a possibility.

Between Madrid and Budapest, definitely not. Spain still mostly has the siesta - everything closes for a few hours in the middle of the day, and plenty use it to have a snooze. This possibly mitigates the western edge of CET issue.

I live in Eastern Portugal, where there’s no siesta, but then again we’re on GMT here, which is better aligned to the sidereal day.

Germans are known to start their day earlier that the french. Getting to work before 8 is very common in Germany and it's definitely not in France.

> If the time shift has serious implications, then it ought to be possible to demonstrate them by comparing Paris and Berlin.

That only holds true in all-else-being-equal situations. Or equal enough - I don't know if you can apply this to Paris and Berlin.

There is a long-standing belief that the Spanish style of workday and meals has everything to do with being forced into the central time zone.. I'm not sure on Spain, but France seemed like a nation of sleep deprived zombies to me as a child[_].

It seems simpler to me to enforce a specific time after sunrise that all institutions must create a break for children, office workers, etc to go outside.

[_]Other children told me they copied their parents pattern, to sleep after midnight awake before 7. I think they were copying insomnia.

Edit, downvotes: So time zone implementations from documented fascists are a perfect defence of new changes because we aren't actually willing to discuss their possible negative affects on entire nations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain

"Exposure to morning sunlight"? When? While commuting to a closed workplace with artificial lighting, like the majority of the population does now?

I'd rather have exposure to sunlight after work, when I can actually, you know, be outside and receive it, rather than be in closed spaces during practically all the sunlit hours.

As for the kids, there is strong evidence than being actually outside receiving sunlight is good for, e.g. preventing myopia. So it's also better for them to have sunlight after school so they can play in the park under the sun, than have it while they're at a closed space. Apart from the fact that they prefer it that way.

PS: I'm not from Canada, but there is a similar debate in my country, and I strongly prefer permanent DST. Actually, according to polls, a considerable majority of the population does, but they still want to set permanent non-DST time. Fortunately I have a flexible work schedule so I guess I'll just wake up at 6 instead of 7 but still, the change will have an impact on my family.

I'm in Norway and really appreciate every extra minute of sunlight in the autumn. When commuting, dropping off the kid to school, walking through a frosty parking lot to the office building, and taking the first cup of coffee with glimpse of sun in the window.

It makes the workday morning a lot more tolerable.

Some peer-reviewed scientific literature:

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

Nowhere do they indicate a 'permanent jet lag', it feels like their open letter has been misconstrued, I assume this is to get a catchy headline? It's a short, easy to read open letter and I was able to understand what they're saying.

They are calling on switching to Standard Time instead of Daylight Saving Time. There can be adverse long term effects of switching to DST as opposed to ST. And finally the reference to jetlag is in the context of _social jetlag_

I don't know what "social jetlag" is, but the 'lag' in jet lag is the latency between a newly imposed sleep schedule and the body's circadian rhythms. You can't have a permanent "lag" - any "lag" effects will be gone within at most a week or two. Whatever the pros and cons of DST, "jet lag" is not the right way to describe them.

"It will be permanent jet lag," said Myriam Juda, a researcher at Simon Fraser University's Circadian Rhythms and Sleep Lab...

But yes, it's meant figuratively or in the social jetlag sense.

Hang on... Right now the sun comes up at 8 am and goes down at 4:30 pm in the dead of winter at the 49th parallel. So it's dark when you get up and dark before you get home from work. And it will still be dark after the change. So what's the problem?

You're absolutely right. It's going to be dark in winter anyway. The problem is that "sleep experts" have personal opinions and preferences, too, and use their expert status to push their personal agendas.

This does not explain why the opinions of sleep researchers are not in line with the general population.

It certainly does. Sleep experts and anyone whose opinions are in like with gen pop don't get quoted in clickbait news articles.

So you think a majority of sleep researchers think we should have DST all year?

The problem is that if permanent DST becomes the norm, the sun will come up at 9 am instead of 8 am. This means that if you take a 'normal' 9 to 5 schedule, you won't see daylight in the morning.

The researchers here are pointing out the problem that if you do not see any sunlight for the first few hours you are active, that will have negative consequences for your sleep.

I see lots of anecdotal 'evidence' given in the comments that you won't see daylight in the morning anyway. But most people will get to see some daylight during their morning commute, unless they get in before 8. Yes, there will be some days where that still isn't true, around the winter solstice. But outside of the middle of the winter, the researchers point out that it is better to have some sunlight in the morning over having none at all.

In the winter, I don't see daylight neither in the morning nor evening. One hour sooner would mean there is at least a bit more sun after work, when I can actually spend that hour outside.

If anyone wants to go over the literature, this article has a good review:

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

TL; DR:

> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.

> A solution to the problem is shown in Figure 2C, which contains a combination of obliterating DST (in favor of permanent Standard Time) and reassigning countries and regions to their actual sun-clock based time zones.

The official position of the scientists who study this sort of thing:

> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

The field in question:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

Summary: if the sun rises later in winter then it will be dark when most people wake up, which confuses your body and could lead to sleep deprivation.

Blaming the clock system is easy. True blame is on work practices. It is the year-round same-hour alarm that awakes people at awkward times, not the time itself.

The real health solve is for workplaces to set an adaptive clock-in time, so everyone wakes up with the sun.

International companies already have a country-dependent clock-in time; this is not much of a stretch.

Agreed. We’re clearly at a point where worker and individual rights are at a minimum and corporate and business rights a near totalitarian max.

A "winter schedule" in schools would be the simpler solution than shifting time by an hour for everybody...

(Edit: Mentioning schools since the article explicitly talks about children...)

Maybe not as simple if the parents or guardians also have to manage taking the kids to school at a certain time before going to work, conversely could make pick up schedules better. Point is it’s not as simple as change school schedules.

> Summary: if the sun rises later in winter then it will be dark when most people wake up

Unless you wake up after 8am (which most people do not, during the week), then you already will have to wake up before sunrise in Vancouver, B.C., even without year-round daylight time.

It's going to be dark when you wake up anyway, at least in areas like Canada or Northern Europe where people get up early.

This really happens to be. I have so much trouble waking up and going to sleep when they implement daylight savings here in Europe. To make matters worse, I am a night-owl, so getting to the office is quite difficult for me.

If the issue is that children will have to wake up too early, make school start later.

Then parents will have to go to work later, so the whole day will be shifted for everyone.

The European CET timezone is so wide, that several countries should actually be in other timezones. Meaning: they already are part of this effect... and yet somehow the medical experts didn't notice significant issues.

They did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_the...

I find it hard to believe that this could have any significant effect, given all the other negative influences on sleep we already have that seem to be way more drastic.

In any case, our whole style of life has shifted from the mornings into the evenings, so summertime makes much more sense than having no daylight savings time at all. Summertime for the whole year is definitely my personal preference. To be fair, I live in Portugal, where wintertime for the whole year would be overall bad for the way we live and for tourism, because it means that it will be dark at 8 PM instead of 9 PM. People here mostly live in the evenings and start work at 9 AM and even later.

Or, keep adjusting for one hour twice a year. I've never had any problems or complaint about shifting time either. It is nothing, not even a nuisance. IMHO, there is no need to change something that works fine.

So by following that, everyone that does DST is on permanent jet lag 6 months of the year? I don’t think so.

No, because the sun rises earlier in Summer.

No surprise there. The whole point of DST is for the clock to loosely follow sunrise, as opposed to the solar noon - so that daylight doesn't get "wasted" in the longest summer days.

Brisbane, Australia is one place that should really be on permanent "daylight savings time" relative to Melbourne and Sydney, or to put it a different way, be UTC+11 rather than UTC+10.

Sunrise tomorrow morning will be 4:57am and by the solstice - 4:45am. Sydney on DST will be a much more civilised 5:57am. That's sun shining in your window being on the East coast, it's actually getting light much earlier!

If Brisbane was permanently UTC+11 it would be on the same time as Sydney through summer (DST is 6 months of the year) and then an hour ahead for winter. The latest sunrise time in winter would then be 7:38am which is the same as Melbourne's and 1/2 hour later than Sydney. But given it's the dry season and rarely overcast, daylight will begin more like 7:00am.

In the Netherlands, this is currently a hot discussion. At the moment, the Netherlands belongs to the same timezone as Berlin. Historically, the dutch time was GMT+0020 (that's right, 20 minutes more than GMT). This would be the most natural timezone for the Netherlands. During the German occupation in the 1940s, the Dutch time was set to the same timezone as Germany. After the war was over, this was kept as timezone.

Thus, we already have a timezone shifted in the wrong way, with less daylight during the morning and more in the evenings. Moving to permanent DST, would move our time even further away from the biological clocks of everyone.

I am in favour of abolishing daylight time and simply using time that assumes sun is close to peak at noon. "Regular time", that is. I think it is backwards to change time to fit human habits. Change the habits instead.

Doesn't work with countries far from the equator, where the sun never reaches the zenith during winter time.

Local noon is measured by meridian passage (a line) and not just the zenith (a point, directly overhead). I assume that is what OP meant...have clock noon be close to local noon. It’s a complicated issue, particularly long term, for example, where it then bumps into the move to get rid of leap seconds.

Exactly. The usual timezones are set up with the general intent that 12:00 is close to the time when sun is at its highest point in the sky. That is how our time historically was calibrated and I don't see why that needs to change if daylight time is abolished. It is a good reference. What else would be a better reference?

Imagine living somewhere far north like Ellesmere Island or Tromsø Norway where the sunlight hours in some parts of the year are practically non existent.

I grew up in Northern Norway. It's pretty neat, to be honest -- it's true that the sun never rises in the winter, but it's sort of circling right underneath the horizon, so it doesn't get properly dark either!

(If you just look at the calendar, the period of absolute night is fairly short. But this is Norway, so even if the sun is technically above the horizon, it's probably hidden behind a mountain.)

Mediterranean latitudes have far darker nights. This is especially true with snow on the ground; at that point you can easily navigate by moonlight.

That being said, it is pretty dark. Norway has a particular type of seasonal affective disorder which doesn't strike anywhere further south, and which manifests as... well, difficulty sleeping, loss of energy, depression, lots of bad things.

It never seems to affect anyone who grew up there, but it can be an issue even for Norwegians who move northwards. As for refugees who end up placed there ... often they decide whatever they were running from was the lesser of two evils.

It's bad enough in the rest of Norway, and the north of Scotland - I really feel like the lack of daylight has a negative effect on my mental health.

So um, what if we just changed the time we go into work to something more sensible, instead of changing the actual time.

This is an unconvincing argument.

Singapore is effectively on year-round daylight time. Singapore is just barely north of the equator, but it's on the same timezone as Indonesia, which puts it a full hour ahead of the timezone it "should" be on, according to its solar noon. As a result, sunrise is around 7am and sunset is around 7pm every day of the year.

Somehow, this hasn't caused the country to fall into collapse, the way these quoted sleep experts make it sound.

The article is about Canada, far from the equator, where sunrise times are substantially later in the winter months. Singapore is not a relevant case for the experts' concern.

Yes, but "Canada" is big, and most of the people live on the southern portion of it.

The southern Ontario wine region is at the same latitude as France's wine region. Scotland is at the same latitude as northern Quebec.

Compare locations on a globe.

France, Scotland. Neither of those are Singapore last time I checked.

By all means make comparisons to France and Scotland, I don't have any issues with that.

> most of the people live on the southern portion of it.

Yeah and the 'south of Canada' is at the 49th parallel more or less.

Singapore is at 1°N.

> The article is about Canada, far from the equator, where sunrise times are substantially later in the winter months.

Not really that much later. On the winter solstice, sunrise in Vancouver is around 8am, which is less than an hour after Singapore (Singapore's sunrise can be as late as 7:15am).

That would be 9am with the proposed change. Quite a difference between 7:15 and 9.

> Somehow, this hasn't caused the country to fall into collapse, the way these quoted sleep experts make it sound.

Maybe if they got better sleep they wouldn't draft laws that get people flogged for putting their shoes on the wrong feet or being nude in their own apartment.

These problems get more pronounced as you travel away from the equator. In places where sun rises at 9:00 and sets at 16:00 for months every year, these little changes are a big deal.

> In places where sun rises at 9:00 and sets at 16:00 for months every year

This article is not about those places. It's about British Columbia, where sunrise on the winter solstice is less than an hour later than Singapore's typical sunrise.

No.

Sunrise at 7am seems fine to me. But at my place for example it would mean sunrise as late as 9 or 10am at the shortest day of the year. This is compelling to me at least.

This is an argument for people to wake up later, not for clocks to be set back an hour.

I say keep standard time and maybe add some more time zones.

Well that’s just about the stupidest thing I’ve heard.

Solution: year-round standard time

That's exactly what TFA prescribes

I hope this gains some traction. I lived in Arizona for a while, which is on permanent standard time, and it was great. Now I’m on the east coast and the sun comes up at 8 am. Thankfully the clocks change tonight, but if they didn’t, which is what’s being considered here too, that would only get later and later.

These discussions around setting clocks to full hours from GMT get us nowhere, they miss the point: our problem is that our lives are organised around arbitrarily set, typically "rounded" times of day, for no real reason other than that we've always done it that way. We now have the means to change that and e.g. set school timetables relative to sunrise and can expect everyone to have the means to follow them (e.g. a school app that shows you the exact times for every day, or a general converter from "Sunrise +6 hours" to clock time). Workplaces, buses could also adapt similarly. So we could finally get rid of living by fixed timetables and switch to healthy schedules according to sunlight.

TL;DR switch from "GMT+X" to "Sunrise+X" assisted by IT for most things to solve all problems.

It's kinda funny, discussions about time zones usually devolve into the idiotic "UTC everywhere" suggestion, but your suggestion is the complete opposite, and will result in time being different for everyone, from city to city.

So you'll have a gradual half-hour difference between San Diego and Seattle in the summer. When it's sunrise in San Diego, it's Half Past Sunrise in Seattle. You're in Seattle, you have a phone meeting with someone in San Diego at two hours past sunrise. Uh, when is that again? Oh, and you bring in a third party from someone in SF, he's 15 minutes off to both of you.

> Uh, when is that again?

Uhm, it will be 18:26 or so for everyone. What's the problem?

Ah, ok, you don't want to move time, you want to move opening hours relative to sunrise. Gotcha.

That's not insane, but it's a very, very, very hard sell. I think the closest you can get is having schools and workplaces move their starting hours by half-hour increments across the year.

Why not relative to sunset? I care about daylight much more after work when I have time for myself than in the mornings where I get up and hurry to get there, and I think most people are similar.

What's GMT got to do with this?

All timezones are defined relative to GMT (usually in full/half hours), so all clock times in the US are, too.

Gotcha. Though in this day and age having our time based on the sun is a bit of an anachronism, as we work under artificial lighting and not in a field. And in any case Sunrise is not good enough, as some Nordic countries don't have any sunrise at all during winter.

What's Sunrise+1 in Iceland in December?

I'm sure for those extreme cases, their government would be able to determine the most suitable/healthy time to wake up for each day of year, using scientific methods.