Confused about daylight savings now? You're not alone

Millions of Canadians will move their clocks back one hour this weekend, while millions of others will not. Starting this year, Alberta, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories and parts of B.C. and Ontario will no longer change their clocks. They join Yukon and Saskatchewan. Most of Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces will still turn their clocks back on November 1st. Confused? You're not alone. CBC News science and climate specialist Darius Madavi is here to help us sort it out. He's never confused about these things. Darius, what should people expect on Sunday morning? I'll be honest, this is a tough one, Andrew. It is difficult to wrap your mind around sometimes. I mean, for as long as I've lived here, as long as most people or anybody has, Ontario and BC have been three hours apart. And soon that will no longer be the case. And that's just one of the domino effects. So let's start by taking a look at this map. It shows you all the places that are going to change their clocks come this Sunday. So it's many parts of Ontario, as well as the rest of eastern Canada, but not everywhere. See that small sliver of northwestern Ontario there, not changing its clocks. That includes places like Kenora, so they can stay aligned with Manitoba. A large section of Nunavut also not changing its clocks. And so all of this put together means that this winter, the time. that we're going to be seeing is going to be quite a bit different than what we've experienced in the past, which could get pretty messy. Here's a map of all of North America. And just to drive home, this isn't just a difference in the amount of time between different provinces, but also down along the border. If you move between B.C. and Washington state now, you're going to actually go. Back an hour, because Washington State is falling back and B.C. is not. And if you heard the hesitation in my voice there, it's because, again, this gets pretty complicated. Now, I want to play you a clip from a journalist that CBC spoke to earlier this week. This is Carmi Levy. He has done a lot of work speaking with people in different organizations about what this might look like going forward. And as you'll hear, it looks a bit messy. Take a listen. calendaring systems or messaging systems, the times that individual users, depending on which side of the border they're on, will be seeing might be different, might be confusing, leading to meetings being missed, deadlines being blown, things like that. Most people on planet Earth don't even realize that this is an issue. And that's part of the problem. They're going to wake up and something is going to be wrong. They're not going to understand why. So, for instance, one of the big concerns here is that not all devices are going to fall in line at the same time. We have a lot of devices that maybe haven't been updated yet, won't know that the time zones have changed. So if your time zone is set to, for instance, Canada slash Vancouver, which is a sub-preset in many... Many operating systems, if you haven't updated it recently, it's not going to know not to fall back. So you might have, for instance, your phone, which you have updated recently or that gets settings from your carrier that will know not to change the time, but your computer might not. So your devices might not even agree on what time it is. So this could get a little bit, again, a little bit messy. I want to show you a text that myself and a number of our CBC colleagues received today here in BC. It details from Bell that as of November 1st, Our area will be keeping daylight savings time year-round, but the complicated part here is that some of our colleagues in Toronto also got this message, where, of course, they are going to be falling back. So this is just one of the complications, Andrew, that even these massive companies are still trying to deal with. I got it, too. Yeah, on my phone, too. And that's not the case here in Toronto. We are falling back. Okay, beyond those complications, there's also been controversy. What can you tell us about that? Right, so the idea that all these provinces that are switching back have decided to go with daylight time rather than standard time has also caused some people to raise concerns. And I want to just talk a little bit about that. First of all, let's look at this map again. I want to highlight Saskatchewan here has not changed their clocks in many decades, and they stick with what they call Central Standard Time. But in reality, based on the position of the sun, based on the longitude of Saskatchewan, what they're really sticking with... is daylight time. They just call it standard time. And so when we talk about these potential effects, these downstream effects of, you know, kids not seeing the sunlight when they first wake up, this is something that Saskatchewan has been dealing with for decades now. And we haven't heard much about the impacts there. I'm not saying that there's not going to be impact. Sleep experts are emphatic that standard time would be better for most people, circadian rhythms and schedules. But this is a lot more of a complicated topic than it might seem at first glance, as I I hope you can see now. And I think that it will be some time before we really get a clear picture of the impacts of daylight time year-round. Darius, thank you. Who knows what our phones are going to say to us on Sunday. CBC News Science and Climate Specialist Darius Madhavi in Vancouver.