The final spring-forward happened at 2 a.m. today
At 2 a.m. local time, British Columbia pushed clocks ahead one hour and locked them there for good, ending twice-yearly time shifts as a fuel-saving measure. More than 90 percent of the province's residents backed the move in consultations, Premier David Eby told NPR, giving his government the political cover to ignore warnings from sleep scientists. The change affects every school start time, bus route, and shift change for the 4.8 million people who live west of the Rocky Mountains.
Health warnings from scientists who studied the 1974 U.S. flop
Emily Manoogian, senior staff scientist at the Salk Institute and executive member of UC San Diego's Center for Circadian Biology, points to the United States' one-year experiment with permanent daylight time in 1974: children walked to school in pitch dark, a few fatal car accidents occurred, and Congress reversed the law before winter ended. A Stanford study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2025 found that switching our clocks twice a year takes a massive public health toll. The study also found that switching permanently to standard time would result in 300,000 fewer people having strokes and more than 2 million fewer cases of obesity. Manoogian says light is the body's wake-up signal; without morning sunlight, circadian clocks drift, raising risks for heart attacks, depression, and metabolic disorders.
Why B.C. picked nightlife over biology
Eby argues the province's western edge already rises in darkness during winter, so trading morning light for an extra hour of evening sun matches how people actually live. "People really want that hour at the end of the day," he said, noting after-work sports leagues, retail traffic, and tourism operators lobbied hard for the change. The premier conceded the health risks but concluded that residents accustomed to dark commutes would accept darker sunrises in exchange for sunsets pushed past 5 p.m. in December.
The math: 238 more evenings of light, zero more mornings of it
British Columbia will now stay on the equivalent of daylight saving time for 238 days each year, the same span the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology clocks for its own daylight period. The province joins Yukon in permanent daylight time while the rest of Canada keeps switching clocks back in November.
What you can still control
Manoogian advises families to anchor sleep by locking in consistent meal and exercise times, dimming house lights after 8 p.m., and getting outside before 10 a.m. even when skies are gray. Schools can shift first bells later; employers can allow flexible starts. British Columbia's government has published no adjustment aid, so residents who feel groggy next week will need to stage their own circadian rescue.
