Is Danielle Smith stomping on democracy by making daylight time permanent, even though we had a referendum?
Maybe. It's not clear-cut. Let's dig in.
The referendum
In 2021, Alberta held a referendum. We asked this question to see if Albertans were in favour of moving to permanent DST in order to stop changing the clocks.
It failed by a very slim 0.2%. If 2,546 people flipped, we'd have touched our microwaves nine fewer times since.
The question mashed two issues into one. Do you want to stop changing the clocks? And if so, which time?
A very clear bipartisan answer
To those questions, we actually have a very clear bipartisan answer. In 2017, the Alberta NDP asked it. In 2020, the UCP did, too. Different governments, very different governments, but same result.
Over 80% want to stop changing the clocks.
Of those, 59% want more afternoon light. That's daylight time.
The real breakdown looks like this:
The huge supermajority: “Stop switching.”
The plurality: “Choose daylight time.”
The loud minority: “Troy's got a comment section? Let's f---- gooooo!”
And that's our referendum result.
The plurality loses because the folks that want standard time would rather take their ball and go home in their pitch-black afternoons than accept daylight time.
Kenney underestimated just how motivated standard time truthers could be, and so his “sure thing” referendum got clocked.
So, is it “undemocratic” to move ahead?
Could be.
Two separate governments, years apart, found the same result.
The main historical blocker has been, we can't do this without our neighbours.
It wouldn't be prudent to do so by ourselves.
But now, our neighbours are doing it, too.
And referenda aren't permanent. DST was introduced in 1971 after voters rejected it in a referendum just four years earlier.
Context changes. Time changes.
Well, maybe not anymore.
So, yeah, is Danielle Smith maybe using this to soften us on the idea of ignoring referendum results? Probably.
But is the change anti-democratic? I don't think so.
This is the result of trying to distill messy, complex problems into yes or no questions.
If democracy is the will of the people, well, this is what the most people want.
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