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You may have noticed something curious about this discussion, as the governing party hastens to outbid the Conservatives on daylight saving hatred: no one at all seems to give a damn about whether daylight saving actually accomplishes its intended energy-conservation purpose. On New Year’s Day Albertans will start paying a fairly strict carbon tax, intended to create an incentive for incremental reductions in the amount of greenhouse gas that persons and businesses emit. The NDP brought this in as a moral imperative, over the continuing bellows of truck drivers and homeowners.

But they seem willing to throw out daylight saving, an inconvenience whose social costs are hypothetical at best, on the basis of no environmental evidence at all. There is not even a faint suggestion that we might like to check. Dang told the CBC that daylight saving was “something that really comes from World War I and II … a really dated practice.”

Here’s the punchline: he uttered these words about 72 hours after the release of an economics paper that is probably the strongest work of scholarship ever attempted on the subject of daylight saving in Canada. Nicholas Rivers, an energy and environment specialist at the University of Ottawa, found that in Ontario Daylight Saving Time leads to a cut in electricity demand of about 1.5 per cent at the time of the spring-forward transition. The cut appears to come, as one would predict from the theory of daylight saving, from the reduced use of lighting at dusk during early summer. And Rivers shows that the reduction persists for some weeks after the change, with no sign of a tradeoff in the fall upon the return to standard time.