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POLL: Mostly, we really hate the time change

Over 79 per cent of you said in an online poll this week that you'd be happy to get rid of it
time-change

The twice-annual time change could be more unpopular with Village Media readers, but it would take quite a lot of work

Over 79 per cent of you said in an online poll this week that you'd be happy to get rid of it. 

Saskatchewan, uniquely, doesn't change its clocks. This has the odd result that for half the year it shares the time with its neighbour Manitoba, and for the other half of the year it shares the time with its other neighbour, Alberta. 

For their part, Albertans narrowly rejected getting rid of the time change in a referendum in 2021. Only a few thousand votes separated the 'yes' and 'no' options, out of over a million cast. 

Britain got rid of their time change between 1968 and 1971, but ended the experiment because, among other things, the sun didn't rise in northern Scotland until 10am on some dates. 

(The results of the Alberta referendum had no relationship to latitude, as far as can be determined.)

In our poll, which is run across our chain of local sites, there was no real difference based on income level or gender:

 

There is some relationship to age:

And to a limited extent, a relationship to political views.

Confounding this is the fact that Liberal voters in our polls tend older:

More or less consistently, people who want to keep the time change support the more risk-averse option on a range of issues:

 

 

 

 

 

Arguably, this is continued in the graph below, in which people who don't have or want pets are more likely to want to keep the time change than either cat people or (to a larger extent) dog people.



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Patrick Cain

About the Author: Patrick Cain

Patrick is an online writer and editor in Toronto, focused mostly on data, FOI, maps and visualizations. He has won some awards, been a beat reporter covering digital privacy and cannabis, and started an FOI case that ended in the Supreme Court
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