As we trade our jack-o-lanterns for winter coats, a new yuletide tradition takes over. With the first snow rapidly approaching and the air already crisp with season’s greetings, it must be that festive time of the year: Daylight saving time (DST). Across the country, people collectively forget to adjust their clocks, gaining or losing an hour of sleep in the process. While the clocks might change in perfect synchronicity, our bodies rarely follow suit. Twice a year, we contort our schedules in the name of societal efficiency. Twice a year, we see a devastating spike in automotive accidents. Daylight savings is a demonstration of prioritizing productivity over our natural circadian rhythm.
Daylight savings was formally adopted by Canada in 1918 during World War I as a wartime fuel-saving measure. Its origins, then, are not rooted in agrarian rhythms or the popular supporting farmers’ myth but in the logistical production demands of war and industry. Humanity has existed for millennia without it, and we can continue to exist without it now. It is always worth having skepticism towards any practice that emerged as a temporary instrument to support imperial violence.
Studies have largely disproven the central justification for DST—that shifting the clocks saves energy. Research consistently shows reductions of less than 0.5 per cent, and in some cases—such as Kansas (1997) and Indiana (2011)—energy use actually increased. The persistence of DST reveals less about efficiency than it does about society’s fixation on extraction—the cultural urge to squeeze more work from every hour at the lowest cost. This is not just about sleep or convenience. In fact, it’s antithetical to it; the core issue rests in how capitalism teaches us to view ourselves as machines in need of optimization, instead of humans necessitating patience and rest.
DST does not apply everywhere: In Nunavik—the northern third of Quebec—Makivvik, the Inuit representative organization, surveyed the region and has decided to end the practice in 2026, citing that the system no longer reflects local realities. A 2024 Quebec justice ministry survey showed that 91 per cent of the 214,000 respondents opposed DST and nearly three-quarters of them supported staying on daylight time year-round. There remains a desire among the Nunavimmiut to adopt a system of time authentic to northern life, rather than be dictated by a capitalistic-centred Western framework.
Nature does not ask flowers to bloom in winter, or bears to wake before the thaw. Yet it is mankind alone that is convinced of its Promethean entitlement to steal daylight that’s not hours. Indigenous concepts of time are ecological, embedded in land and aligned with cycles of rest and renewal. Colonial frameworks of time impose the belief that humans dominate nature and are entitled to override natural rhythms. This perspective privileges only the wage-earning nine-to-five worker. When profit dictates time, it dictates whose work is valued. Careworkers and homemakers—disproportionately women—and those in shift-based service fields who labour year-round beyond the constraints of daylight hours, receive no temporal accommodations. This disparity is not a mere oversight: It reflects a broader cultural conviction that wage employment is inherently more worthy of economic recognition and validation while caregiving is not.
Our belief in rationality and human dominion convinces us that we are exempt from nature’s call. Capitalism gives us the exceptionalist illusion that we can outsmart nature. This is a cultural arrogance that has been bred into us and exists at the heart of so much historic violence, evident in the ecological destruction and displacement of communities caused by colonial and industrial expansion. Daylight saving time asks us to forgo being human for one calendar hour. It’s the authoritarian, Fordist industrialism that invites us to consider how willing we are, as a society, to neglect our biology. Beware the Ides of March—it is the great hubris of man to conjure up a 25-hour day that brings the world from dawn to dusk just one hour earlier.
