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A jackass named Me saw this, wrote a column calling attention to Rivers’s study, and observed that “The same data would not be hard to gather for Alberta, and the analysis would be a few days’ work for another economist.” Blake Shaffer, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calgary, saw these words and had the thought that clever, highly educated people often do when reading my work: “He’s right.” Shaffer has repeated Rivers’s effort in the Alberta setting, and has extended it by making interprovincial comparisons that Rivers didn’t.

What he found, of course, was exactly the opposite of what I had guessed and had led readers to expect. I had left the tractor in gear.

In Alberta, whose population is spread out over wider latitudes than other Canadian provinces, the “spring forward” shift that daylight saving imposes leaves citizens waking up in the cold and dark, consuming more electricity than they would if the clocks were left alone. Patio-goers in Alberta’s cities like the long Russian-style evenings of sunlit booze-sipping that springing forward facilitates in the summer. But many workers and parents dislike the loss of morning sunshine in late spring and early autumn.

What he found, of course, was exactly the opposite of what I had guessed and had led readers to expect. I had left the tractor in gear

Almost everyone agrees that we can do away with changing the clocks, but there seem to be roughly equal-sized camps in favour of leaving the time permanently one way (unadjusted mountain time) or the other (mountain standard plus one hour). This seems like a potential can of worms, though a small one, for the Alberta government. If one assumes that I am not the only Albertan who finds the status quo convenient — and I bet financial traders and computer coders will fight for it — the NDP may have done no more than to create an opportunity to disappoint two-thirds of the voting public.

Creating a two-hour time difference with neighbouring B.C. for parts of the year, if we go that way, might be awkward, particularly for the Rocky Mountain economy and lifestyle. Communities in “Greater Alberta,” on either side of the province’s legal borders, would have awkward choices. Yet daylight saving seems all but impossible to defend if it wastes electricity: there is now a firm environmental rationale for change. So much misery and confusion, and I am partly to blame by setting out bait for those damned economists. I ought to have known better.