On Thu, 16 Jul 2026 at 16:06, Guy Harris via tz <[email protected]> wrote: > Or is there enough difference, at the legal and terminological level, > between BC permanent DST and US permanent DST that what works north the > Canada/US border won't work south of it?
At this scale, there's a key qualitative difference between a province/territory or three changing and a whole country changing. On the legal side, in Canada, we've historically tended toward the federal names, which have broadly aligned with US usage to date. (My understanding is that provinces generally haven't actually legislated names for their zones until just now.) The recent changes in BC and Alberta strain that a bit, but not unrecognizably, as year-round MST and CST have already been things in other places. We have yet to see how that will affect popular usage, but there will probably be some growing pains as definitions necessarily shift. Whereas if the whole US shifts, the existing names legally come along for the ride. The names of the zones are also culturally ingrained in the regions that use them, and with the internal differences remaining the same, there'd be no compelling internal reason to change them. In short, even if this goes through, you're not likely to catch a New Yorker saying they're on Atlantic Time or an Angeleno saying they're on Mountain Time. -- Tim Parenti
