ANALYSIS: Permanent Daylight Saving Time in Alberta — When a Clock-Setting Decision Can Empty the Slopes

Daylight saving time kills. Standard time, on the other hand, just shifts the problems.

Let’s start by acknowledging the truth: changing the clocks twice a year has measurable and well-documented effects on health. In 2020, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a collective position statement calling for the abolition of daylight saving time. Within 72 hours of the switch to daylight saving time in the spring, admissions to cardiovascular emergency rooms increase by 24% according to several studies. Traffic accidents rise. Productivity plummets. These are facts. They deserve to be taken seriously.

But the question isn’t: Should we abolish the time change? The question is: Which permanent time should we adopt? And on this point, economists, chronobiologists, and sleep specialists disagree. Permanent standard time (Mountain Standard Time) aligns better with human biological rhythms—the human body is synchronized to a solar rhythm, and standard time is closer to mean solar time. Permanent daylight saving time, on the other hand, artificially shifts daylight toward the evening—which is pleasant in July, but which causes sunrise in January to occur at times that disrupt mornings, travel departures, and outdoor activities.

Chronobiology tells us one simple thing that politicians pretend not to understand: we don’t gain an hour. We shift it. And shifting an hour of morning light to the evening in January, in the Canadian Rockies, isn’t a gain—it’s a brutal transfer from one economic sector to another, without anyone having been consulted.

What Saskatchewan Has Understood—and What It Hasn’t Resolved

Saskatchewan is the only Canadian province to have adopted a permanent fixed time zone. It has chosen Central Standard Time year-round, which puts it on Manitoba’s daylight saving time in the summer and Manitoba’s standard time in the winter. It’s a strange arrangement that creates time differences with its neighbors. Saskatchewanians have put up with this for decades—and when asked, they say it’s infinitely better than changing the time twice a year. But Saskatchewan doesn’t have the Rocky Mountains. It doesn’t have Sunshine Village. It doesn’t have a ski industry that relies on morning light as a strategic asset.

And yet, Alberta looks to Saskatchewan and sees a solution. What it doesn’t see is that Saskatchewan chose its time zone based on its geography and economy. Alberta, on the other hand, is considering permanent daylight saving time—the worst possible option for a province whose mountains begin three hours west of the capital. This isn’t a time policy. It’s an economic policy disguised as a time policy. And it hasn’t been presented as such.

Jackson Hole Isn’t Concerned About Edmonton’s Decisions

Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming recorded 1.2 million skier days during the 2023–2024 season. Vail, in Colorado, recorded 1.7 million. These numbers won’t go down if Alberta adopts permanent daylight saving time. They will increase. Because the luxury ski market in the western United States is a substitute market: affluent skiers from Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto—those who plan their vacations six months in advance and spend 5,000 to 15,000 Canadian dollars per family on a week of skiing—these skiers have options. They compare. They weigh the value for money and the overall experience.

If Sunshine Village offers them a mountain that comes to life in the dark and mornings effectively shortened by an hour, while Steamboat Springs offers them the same snow with the sun already up by the time they strap on their skis—the choice isn’t difficult. And this gentle, gradual migration, almost imperceptible over one or two seasons, eventually creates a permanent shortfall in visitor numbers. Canadian resorts won’t close. But they’ll slowly lose their premium clientele—the ones who spend the most, the ones who return season after season, the ones who keep Canmore’s gear shops and Banff’s fine-dining restaurants in business.

I don’t believe the Alberta government wants to kill its ski industry. I believe it simply doesn’t see it. It sees clocks, routines, and opinion polls on daylight saving time. It doesn’t see the idle chairlifts and the ski instructors on furlough. That’s the nature of technocratic decisions: they’re made on the scale of a wall clock, not on the scale of a mountain.

The Canadian dollar is making everything worse

At 72 U.S. cents (March 2025 exchange rate), the Canadian dollar is at a five-year low. For an American skier, coming to Banff is already a bargain: every dollar spent in Canada costs 28% less than in the United States. But for a Canadian skier considering crossing the border, the equation is reversed. A day of skiing in Jackson Hole costs them, in Canadian dollars, approximately $420 per person. That’s expensive. But if the Canadian resort offers an experience marred by gloomy mornings and lift tickets priced based on fewer hours of daylight, the extra cost of going to the U.S. becomes acceptable. Skiing is a leisure activity centered on comfort. When comfort decreases on one side and the price difference remains manageable—people cross the border.

And yet, Alberta did not include the exchange rate variable in its analysis of standard time. It did not consult resort operators before launching the public debate. It framed the question about time as if it were a matter of comfort during office mornings, without understanding that in the mountains, time is a matter of economic survival.

Sarah, 38, three children, a season pass

Sarah Beaumont, 38, a project manager at an engineering firm in Calgary, purchased season passes for her entire family at Sunshine Village for the 2024–2025 season. Three children—Liam, 9, Zoé, 7, and Mathis, 5. The family pass: 2,340 Canadian dollars. She leaves at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday from their home in Tuscany, in northwest Calgary. She arrives at the lifts at 9:15 a.m. The sun is already out. The kids are hungry; they’re asking for hot chocolate; they want to go on the beginner’s slope. The day is long, bright, and exhausting—in the best possible way. They head home at 5:30 p.m., cheeks red, legs heavy, already negotiating to come back next week.

With permanent daylight saving time, Sarah leaves at 7:30 a.m. in complete darkness. Her three children are in the car, eyes half-closed, the sun nowhere to be seen. They arrive at 9:15 a.m., and the sun rises at 9:47 a.m. The first runs take place in a gray, cold light that flattens the terrain and makes the bumps invisible. For Mathis, age 5, who is learning to ski, this light makes the difference between a joyful morning and an anxious one. Sarah knows this. She won’t say so in a survey on daylight saving time. She won’t campaign against the bill. She’ll simply book her next ski vacation in Whitefish, Montana. Because there, the sun will rise at the right time.

Sarah isn’t a statistic. She is the exact mechanism by which a time policy turns into an economic exodus. Not spectacular. Not in the news. Just individual decisions, multiplied by ten thousand families, that eventually eat into the bottom lines of resorts that never asked anyone for anything.

The polls say yes. The slopes will say no.

Polls on permanent daylight saving time in Alberta are encouraging for its proponents: a majority of Albertans say they support abolishing the time change. It’s only human. Everyone hates setting their clocks twice a year. Everyone has experienced that Monday in March when the alarm goes off an hour too early and it takes the brain three days to adjust. The idea of a fixed, stable, permanent time—it’s an idea that goes over well in a telephone poll at 6:30 p.m.

But polls don’t capture what skiers do in November when they book their January vacations. They don’t capture the logic of Japanese tour operators who put together their Canadian Rockies brochures in July. They don’t capture the decisions of Calgary-based companies that organize their team retreats in the mountains in February. These decisions are made by looking at charts, schedules, and sunrise times. And if those charts show that morning light has been cut by an hour—those decisions change.

Tariffs and the Mountain: A Changing Equation

In March 2025, the Trump administration imposed 25% tariffs on Canadian imports. Canada’s response was immediate on a rhetorical level: boycotts of American products, calls for domestic tourism, and “Buy Canadian” campaigns. For Alberta’s ski industry, this political context could have been a boon. A Canadian skier looking to show national solidarity would choose Sunshine Village over Steamboat Springs. This is a real trend, documented in the weeks following the announcement of the tariffs.

And yet, Alberta is simultaneously considering making its own resorts less attractive to its own domestic clientele. On the one hand, Ottawa is asking Canadians to avoid the United States. On the other, Edmonton is considering a policy on operating hours that will drive Alberta families toward U.S. resorts. This is not a superficial contradiction. It is a fracture in the coherence of Canadian economic policy, visible from a gondola at an altitude of 2,700 meters. The mountain doesn’t lie. It doesn’t play politics. It simply calculates the hours of daylight.

I find something deeply symptomatic in this situation. Canada is fighting against U.S. tariffs with slogans of national solidarity, while provinces are considering policies that make Canadian territory less competitive than U.S. territory. This isn’t ill will. It’s disorganization. And disorganization, in an economic war, looks a lot like surrender.

Banff and Canmore: The Complete Economic Chain

The town of Banff recorded 4.2 million visitors in 2023. Canmore, at the entrance to the national park, welcomed 3.1 million. Both towns thrive on skiing, snowshoeing, and ice sports—winter outdoor activities that all, without exception, begin at sunrise. The hotels on Banff Avenue, the restaurants on Main Street, the equipment rental shops in Canmore—their revenue depends on the number of people who get up early in the morning to head up a mountain.

An hour of lost daylight in the morning isn’t just an hour less of skiing. It’s a visitor who leaves an hour earlier. It’s a mountain lunch that no one eats. It’s a coffee and a croissant in Canmore that no one buys on the way back. It’s a ski instructor who ends the day with a group of five students instead of six. Multiply that by a season. Multiply that by ten years. It’s businesses closing down. Apartments standing empty. Families leaving communities that can’t afford to lose visitors.

Permanent Standard Time: The Obvious Solution That Politicians Are Avoiding

The chronobiologically sound solution—which is economically neutral for the ski industry and aligns with the recommendations of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine—is permanent standard time. Mountain Standard Time year-round. No time changes. Sunrises that correspond to actual solar time. Bright mornings in January. Evenings that are certainly shorter in the summer—but evenings that end at 9:30 p.m. rather than 10:30 p.m., which, for most workers and families, is perfectly acceptable.

This solution isn’t part of the public debate in Alberta. It isn’t included in government proposals. It isn’t popular because it gives the impression of “losing” an hour of evening light in the summer. Café patios. Barbecue nights. Outdoor soccer games at 8 p.m. These are powerful images that resonate with voters. Permanent daylight saving time sells the dream of summer. Permanent standard time sells January mornings on the mountain. The government has chosen its electorate. It’s not the one that wears skis.

Here’s the burning truth: permanent daylight saving time is a “summer patio” policy sold in the dead of winter. It sacrifices thousands of jobs in the Rocky Mountain valleys to satisfy an aesthetic preference for bright July evenings. It’s an asymmetrical trade-off. And no one in the government has done the full economic analysis.

Interprovincial Coordination: The Phantom Project

If Alberta adopts permanent daylight saving time, it will be one hour out of sync with British Columbia in the winter—which will create complications for businesses, transportation, and telecommunications in the Calgary-Vancouver corridor. It will be aligned with Saskatchewan for six months of the year and out of sync for the other six months. It will be one hour behind Montana in the winter and aligned with it in the summer. This patchwork of time zones is the result of a unilateral provincial decision in a country where provinces are free to choose their own time—but where the economy, for its part, does not respect provincial borders.

No interprovincial coordination is currently underway. No federal task force has been mandated to study the consequences of a Canadian time zone patchwork. Each province looks at its own polls, its own immediate political interests, and decides on its own. The result, in ten years, could be a Canadian time zone map of Kafkaesque complexity—and a tourism industry that will have wasted a decade explaining to international visitors why the time is different in Banff and Revelstoke.

The 2025–2026 season will be the first test

If Alberta’s Permanent Time Bill is passed before the summer of 2025, its effects will be felt during the 2025–2026 ski season. The first reservations for that season will begin in August and September 2025. That’s when families, tour operators, and international travel agencies will finalize their plans. That’s when the time zone decision will translate into reservation revenue—or a lack thereof.

Resorts won’t know this right away. It won’t be until January 2026 that they’ll start to see visitor numbers. It won’t be until March 2026 that they’ll have a full season to analyze. And by that time, the bill will have already been passed for nine months. The economic effects of a time zone policy take a season to materialize—and a generation to reverse. Families who have gotten into the habit of skiing in Montana won’t automatically return to Alberta if the time changes again.

That’s the cruel logic of economic decisions with delayed consequences. When the bill comes due, it will be presented to people who may no longer have the means to pay it. And the decision that caused it will already be enshrined in law, defended by the very same people who still won’t see the connection between an hour on the clock and an unused ski pass sitting in a drawer.

The Ski Instructors Who Don’t Make the Headlines

Anders Lindqvist, 34, a Level 4 certified ski instructor at Sunshine Village since 2018, earns between 42,000 and 58,000 Canadian dollars per season, depending on the number of private and group lessons he teaches. He lives in Canmore with his partner, who works in the hospitality industry in Banff. Their monthly rent: $2,100. Their ability to absorb a drop in visitor numbers: zero. If Sunshine Village loses 15% of its clientele over the course of a season—a conservative estimate by industry experts under the permanent daylight saving time scenario—Anders will lose lessons. He will lose income. He may not lose his job the first season. But the second, the third—the calculations will be made in management offices, not in provincial government meetings.

Anders doesn’t vote on time zone policy. He doesn’t lobby in Edmonton. He doesn’t have an office in Calgary’s Bow Tower. He has skis, a certificate, and a $2,100-a-month apartment in a mountain valley. It’s people like him who are the first to be affected by time-zone decisions and the last to be protected by them. And yet, their names don’t come up in any parliamentary debates on permanent daylight saving time.

Alberta’s Political Calendar for 2025

Premier Danielle Smith indicated in January 2025 that her government was in favor of abolishing daylight saving time, without specifying which permanent time zone Alberta would adopt. This ambiguity is not an oversight—it is a strategy. It keeps the door open to permanent daylight saving time—the option most popular in polls—while avoiding a formal commitment until the government has gauged the reactions of the affected economic sectors. Ski resorts are currently providing those reactions. The question is whether they will be heard before the decision is made—or after.

Alberta’s legislative calendar suggests a decision could come in the fall of 2025. That is, six weeks before the resorts open their first slopes for the 2025–2026 season. Too late for international tour operators to update their brochures. Too late for families to revise their December reservations. Barely enough time for the media to make the connection between the decision and its initial consequences. The government knows this. Perhaps that is why it has chosen this timeline.

I don’t want to believe in bad faith. But the accumulation of signs—the lack of industry consultation, the compressed decision-making timeline, opinion polls cited without economic analysis—ultimately paints a picture that looks a lot like it. A decision made for political expediency, at the expense of economic rigor. This isn’t unusual. It’s the day-to-day reality of governance. What is unusual is that no one is clearly calling it out.

What the resorts asked for—and what they got

Sunshine Village and Lake Louise formally asked the Alberta government for three things: an independent economic impact study on the ski industry before any decision is made, sector-specific consultation with resort operators, and consideration of permanent standard time as an alternative to daylight saving time. As of this writing, none of these three requests has received an official response. The resorts were received at an informal meeting by policy advisors. Their data was “taken into account.” Their recommendations were “noted.” The process continues. The timeline, however, remains unchanged.

And yet, these resorts are among the largest employers in the Banff-Canmore region. They contribute hundreds of millions of dollars in provincial tax revenue. In purely economic terms, they are stakeholders that any sensible government would have consulted first, not after the fact. The fact that they had to fight to be heard—and that they still aren’t certain they will be—speaks volumes about the priorities of the Alberta government.

A decision that is reversible on paper but irreversible in practice

Time laws can be changed. If Alberta adopts permanent daylight saving time and the economic consequences prove to be as serious as Sunshine Village and Lake Louise fear, the government can reverse course. On paper, it’s a reversible decision. But in the reality of habits, markets, and tourist loyalties—nothing could be less certain. Families who have discovered Jackson Hole won’t automatically return to Sunshine Village. Japanese tour operators who have redirected their itineraries to Colorado won’t rebuild their networks of Canadian partnerships in a single season.

The mountain is patient. It waits. It will still be there in a hundred years—snow-covered, majestic, indifferent to the decisions of provincial governments. But the businesses that thrive at its base, the instructors who teach on its slopes, the families who pass on their love of the snow to their children—they cannot wait. They have rents to pay, mortgages, and salaries to cover in March when the season ends. And if this season is shorter, emptier, and gloomier than it should have been—no one in the offices in Edmonton will pay their bills for them.

What strikes me about this story is the disproportion between the triviality of the decision and the magnitude of its consequences. One hour. Sixty minutes shifted on a clock face. And on the other side of that shift: hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of jobs, entire communities that live or die depending on whether skiers show up or stop coming. The clock is small. The mountain is big. This government still hasn’t figured out which of the two deserves more respect.

The question no one dares to ask in Edmonton

If British Columbia adopts permanent standard time—as its studies suggest—and Alberta adopts permanent daylight saving time, the two provinces will be off by one hour in the winter and aligned in the summer. This time difference will directly affect the Calgary-Vancouver corridor, one of Western Canada’s most important economic corridors. It will affect rail connections, flights, and conference calls between corporate headquarters. It will affect workers who live in Alberta and work in British Columbia. It will affect University of Calgary students who take classes via videoconference with UBC.

And no one in either provincial government is discussing coordination. Each province is focused on its own interests, its own polls, and its own election schedule. Canada in 2025 is a country fighting for its economic unity in the face of U.S. tariffs, while allowing its provinces to make conflicting time-zone decisions that are silently fragmenting the domestic market. This isn’t provincial sovereignty. It’s collective improvisation on a national scale.

And while politicians debate clocks, Anders Lindqvist straps on his skis at 7:45 a.m., in the still-gray light, on a mountain that doesn’t wait for decisions from Edmonton. He has a group of beginners at 9 a.m. He hopes next season will be like this one. He hopes the parking lot will be just as full. He hopes that someone, somewhere, will have realized that permanent daylight saving time isn’t just an administrative detail. It’s his life.

The Final Image

In January 2026, if nothing changes in Alberta’s decision, the sun will rise at 9:47 a.m. over Sunshine Village. The first skiers will arrive while it’s still dark. Children will look out the gondola windows at a mountain still shrouded in gray, its contours flattened, its shadows gone. Two hundred kilometers to the south, in Montana, the sun will have been up for 50 minutes. The slopes will already be golden. The Instagram photos will already have been taken. The Alberta families who’ve done the math will be there.

And Kendra Scurfield, president of Sunshine Village, will be in her office looking at the attendance figures for the first weekend in January. She’ll know, at that moment, whether the Alberta government has understood what she told them. The numbers won’t lie. They won’t need to. They’ll simply say what a deserted mountain always says: someone, somewhere, decided that the morning light wasn’t worth protecting.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist