“Albertans have very strong opinions about daylight saving time and the results of the referendum show that, right now, Albertans prefer to continue changing their clocks,” Nate Glubish, then the minister of Service Alberta, said sadly in a news release published on Oct. 26, 2021.
“There is no right or wrong answer on DST,” Mr. Glubish assured his readers in the canned quote assigned to him in the release.
“We respect the decision made and will continue to focus on the pandemic and on Alberta’s economic recovery,” he promised.
Notwithstanding the implication of the news release’s technically correct lead sentence, the results were pretty close. There were 536,874 ballots cast in favour of leaving things the way they were in then-premier Jason Kenney’s stab at getting Albertans used to referendums as a tool for manipulating representative democracy. That was 50.2 per cent of the ballots cast, which, readers will have to admit, is higher than 50.1 per cent, which is normally supposed to be the baseline for this sort of thing.
As for the Yes side, 531,782 voters opted for permanent daylight savings,49.8 per cent of the valid ballots cast, Elections Alberta reported.
This happened despite Mr. Kenney’s effort to swing voters toward a yes vote. “Across Canada and the United States, more governments are bringing forward legislation to move to permanent daylight saving time, also known as summer hours,” enthused an earlier news release about the vote published by the government on July 15 that year, possibly to distract our minds from COVID.
“As Alberta first adopted daylight saving time following a referendum in 1971, we owe it to Albertans to give them the same opportunity to make their voices heard now that we are considering another change,” said Mr. Glubish, who is now conveniently the minister of technology and innovation and therefore won’t have to feel obligated to comment on this.
Having unexpectedly lost, however, he was a good sport. “Albertans will continue to adjust their clocks twice a year as they have in the past,” the October news release intoned as gloomily as a November evening. “The next time change takes place on Nov. 7, when Alberta falls back one hour.”
Well, that was then. This is now.
Yesterday morning’s column by Rick Bell, the Postmedia political columnist who plays the UCP’s de facto minister of information in the daytime TV series known as Alberta Politics, proclaimed unequivocally that “Alberta is going to daylight saving time all year round.”
“Premier Danielle Smith and her UCP government have made the decision,” Mr. Bell explained. “It will go to the Alberta Legislature for debate this week.” After that it will pass thanks to the United Conservative Party majority in the House, whether or not the Opposition agrees, although Mr. Bell felt no need to include that self-evident truth.
As for that stuff about respecting the decisions made by voters in the UCP’s performative direct democracy “initiatives,” forget about it. That was so 2021! This is the New Alberta, strong and free – although stronger and freer for some of us than for others, it would seem.
According to Mr. Bell, channelling Ms. Smith, There Is No Alternative (TINA). British Columbia is doing it! Saskatchewan is too. What else could we do? (One imagines some British Columbians might be pleased if Alberta were to adopt the same philosophical attitude about new pipelines to the West Coast, Danzig Corridors to Prince Rupert, and other such interprovincial ephemera. Don’t count on that happening.)
Ms. Smith is the Decider, and what the Decider decides is what happens. Really, when you think about it, why do we even need a Legislative Assembly?
Anyway, Albertans will have more important things to vote on in referenda soon, like whether or not we should ask the experienced Kristi Noem to come up and run ACE* for us, and whether Premier Smith is going to have to do like Fidel Castro and wear two Rolexes, one of them always set on Washington time.
About the only other factoids of interest in Mr. Bell’s column, which filled in for the news release the government didn’t publish, are that the premier has a dog named Buck, and she wants the new time zone to be called “Alberta Time.”
There’s no guidance as to whether the buck for which the dog is named is a reference to Harry Truman’s metaphorical knife or the almighty U.S. dollar. That said, the poor beast is probably lucky she didn’t call it Bitcoin.
As for Alberta time, one supposes the premier was motivated by a desire to imitate her political hero’s only partly successful effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
Getting back to that October 2021 news release, it also included Mr. Kenney’s constitutionally meaningless and rhetorically dishonest equalization referendum, and the province’s performative Senate non-election, also constitutionally meaningless.
Permanent daylight savings time may seem to be an insignificant issue – unless, of course, you’re a lobbyist for Big BBQ and Big Golf, which risked losing millions if we’d adopted permanent standard time instead.
But the way it was brushed aside by the Smith Government rather does suggest that the UCP brain trust understands perfectly well that referenda are meant to be used to subvert democracy not support it, by reducing a complex policy debate to a zero-sum yes/no equation. And if you don’t get the answer you want, they have obviously concluded, you can just ignore it.
*Alberta Customs Enforcement, of course!
