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About Time in Canada

The Missed Train That Divided the World Into Hours

In July 1876 the railway engineer Sandford Fleming, on a visit to Ireland, misread a printed timetable that listed a departure as p.m. rather than a.m. and spent the night stranded at a small station in Bundoran. Fleming had already spent two decades surveying routes for the Intercolonial Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway and understood better than most how ruinous such confusion could be: on 12 August 1853 a similar mismatch between two conductors' watches, each set to a different local time, had sent two trains into a head-on collision near Providence, Rhode Island, killing fourteen people. Out of the Irish mishap came an essay, Terrestrial Time, in which Fleming argued for abandoning the patchwork of local solar times, of which North America alone had roughly 144, in favour of a single system of hourly zones reckoned from a common reference meridian.

The idea moved from paper to practice faster than most such proposals. On 18 November 1883, North American railway companies adopted Fleming's scheme, sorting the continent into what became the Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern and Intercolonial, later Atlantic, time zones. The following October, delegates from twenty-five nations met in Washington for the International Meridian Conference, where Fleming's zone system, though not formally part of the agenda, was carried home by attendees and adopted piecemeal around the world over the following decades. Not every community fell in line at once. Saint John, New Brunswick kept its own solar time, 24 minutes and 16 seconds behind the new Atlantic standard, and Detroit and Savannah did the same in the United States, but the underlying architecture, twenty-four zones spaced fifteen degrees apart, has remained essentially unchanged since a Canadian engineer worked it out after a night on an Irish platform.

A Town Where the Postmaster, the Lighthouse and the Wireless Kept Three Different Times

Newfoundland, a self-governing dominion until 1949, never sent a delegate to the 1884 conference and was barely connected to the continental railway network, so it settled its own clock independently. Long before that, outport communities had synchronized to the noonday gun fired on Signal Hill above St. John's, with places like Carbonear and Placentia alerted to the shot by telegraph. By the close of the nineteenth century, St. John's time, three hours, 30 minutes and 49.5 seconds behind Greenwich, had become the informal civil standard for the island, a full half hour removed from the neighbouring Atlantic zone because the capital sat much further east than the rest of the territory it governed.

Standardization was neither instant nor complete. Heart's Content, terminus of the transatlantic telegraph cable, stamped its messages with a distinct local time of its own, three hours, 33 minutes and 33 seconds behind Greenwich. A 1917 newspaper report from Cape Ray, on the island's west coast, complained that residents there kept such a mixture of times that a comparative timetable would have been welcome even to a stranger passing through: some went by St. John's standard time, the postmaster by local solar time, the lighthouse keeper by daylight time, and the wireless operators by Eastern time, to stay aligned with their head office in Montreal. It was not until 1935 that Newfoundland's Commission of Government passed a Standard Time Act fixing the dominion's clocks at exactly three and a half hours behind Greenwich, as close as the law could come to St. John's own solar noon.

The half-hour offset survived confederation with Canada in 1949 and two later attempts, in 1951 and 1963, to fold the province into ordinary Atlantic time; both were abandoned after public opposition. Only eleven time zones in the world today are offset from Coordinated Universal Time by something other than a whole hour, and Newfoundland is the sole example in North America, a distinction it once briefly shared with Uruguay, which dropped its own half hour in 1942, and with Suriname, which adopted one in the other direction in 1984.

The Long Dash That Outlived Eighty-Four Years

Precise time in Canada was, for most of the twentieth century, a matter for astronomers rather than engineers. Responsibility passed from the Meteorological Service to the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa in the mid-1930s, formalized by an order-in-council in 1941 naming the observatory the country's official source of time. Its shortwave station, first licensed under the experimental call sign 9CC in 1923 and later known as CHU, broadcast pulses generated by the observatory's own pendulum clocks, switching to quartz control in 1933 for better stability.

On 5 November 1939, as war broke out in Europe, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation carried the observatory's signal on its national radio network for the first time, and the announcement that followed, warning listeners that the beginning of the long dash following ten seconds of silence would mark the hour precisely, became the longest-running feature in the network's history. Responsibility for the signal eventually passed to the National Research Council, whose atomic clocks, kept in a climate-controlled, copper-shielded room in Ottawa, generated the pulses in later decades. After eighty-four uninterrupted years, the broadcast ended for good on 9 October 2023, a casualty less of inaccuracy than of a world in which almost no listener still needed a radio to know the time to the second.

The Territory That Voted to Stop Turning the Clocks

In the far northwest, the territorial government of Yukon took the opposite approach to time and simply stopped adjusting it. Following a motion introduced in the territorial legislature in 2017, officials ran a public survey between January and February 2020 that drew more than 4,800 responses, a record for any online consultation the government had conducted, exceeding even the 2017 engagement on cannabis legalization by some 1,500 replies. Ninety-three percent of respondents wanted the biannual clock change abolished, and 70 percent of that group specifically favoured keeping the summer offset year-round rather than the winter one.

Yukoners duly moved their clocks forward for what turned out to be the last time on 8 March 2020, and when autumn came, nobody moved them back. The change was written into the territory's Time Act that September, leaving the territory permanently seven hours behind Coordinated Universal Time, the offset it had previously used only in summer, all year round. A handful of other jurisdictions in western Canada, including parts of British Columbia near Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, had already abandoned seasonal changes in earlier decades, but Yukon's 2020 decision made it the largest Canadian territory to do so, trading the twice-yearly ritual of Fleming's zone system for a single, unchanging hour.

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