Ever listen to your expatriate Saskatchewan family and friends bemoan daylight saving time? That precious extra hour of sleep afforded to them on a Sunday morning has been snatched away like the last pancake at family breakfast. For most of us in the province, the concept of gaining or losing an hour is foreign unless we’ve been on vacation around the vernal equinox. The worst that happens here at home is that our digital timepieces, the ones that aren’t 'autoslaved' to a cell service, might jump start our day a little early.

For some Saskatchewanians, daylight time is a bit of a mystery. A couple of times a year, we wind up debating what time we need to place a call to Vancouver or what the office hours are for our telebanking services run out of Halifax. It’s less of a mystery if you grew up on or near a provincial border. Where I grew up, kids could take a 20-minute bike ride to the local valley, tear down the valley’s edge at breakneck speeds, and emerge as if by magic in another time zone. Time was measured a bit differently back then. You didn’t worry about 7 o’clock or 8 o’clock. It was always "be back by supper time", or "be in the yard by dark." Time was much more substantial.

The reason Saskatchewan hasn’t adopted DST isn’t that we are inherently stubborn or inflexible. It’s just that the province is parked along an awkward line of longitude. If we adopted DST, then in some parts of the province, the noon hour sirens would go off when the sun was two hours out of the overhead position. There are still quite a few supporters of a move to DST in the province: ball parents, diehard golfers, those reluctant to hear songbirds at 4 a.m. You know who you are. However, with provinces like Alberta and BC considering a move away from this semi-annual ritual, hopes for a provincial conversion of thought to adopting DST might be fading.

Like the last rays of sunlight at 11:00 p.m.