While time may stand still for Geddy Lee and his bandmates, the rest of us will have to rush to our clocks to turn them an hour ahead on Sunday morning.
It will mark the shortest day of the year as many Canadians will set their clocks ahead by an hour as most of the country moves to daylight time.
The clocks will then fall back on Nov. 6 as we return to standard time.
It is a rite of passage that began in Canada in 1908 in two small Ontario towns, Port Arthur and Fort William, which have since merged to form the city of Thunder Bay.
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The move was made to allow people a little more daylight to enjoy after work.
It soon spread to other towns and cities across the country and was then adopted nationally in an effort to conserve energy during the First World War.
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It returned again in the Second World War permanently but there are a few places in Canada that don’t conform to the practice and a few others who are considering dropping the idea.
The province of Saskatchewan, the Yukon and a smattering of towns across Ontario, Quebec and B.C. have skipped out on the program while the governments of B.C., Ontario, Quebec and Alberta have considered scrapping it.
A couple of years ago, the province of Ontario passed a bill to put and end to the time change but made it dependent on New York and Quebec doing so as the areas share trade and the federal government is spread across the two provinces.
In B.C., they are in a similar situation as the province and a couple of U.S. states are awaiting a change in California to pull the trigger.
Alberta held a referendum on the idea in 2021 and just over half of people voted to keep things the way they were.
South of the border, bills have been introduced in many U.S. states to drop the measure as well but so far the only place where it has become law is Arizona.
So, why do many feel it is time to put an end to the changing of the clock? For one, many health professionals feel the time change has harmful effects on the human body.
Doctors from the University of Turku in Finland have suggested that the risk of strokes and heart attacks increases by seven per cent following the time change.
In addition, the number of car crashes also tends to increase once we make the time shift.
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine reported there was an eight per cent jump in car crashes the day after a time change.
— with files from Global News
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
