On 8/16/2026 2:49 PM, Tim Parenti via tz wrote:
The RDEK board's original March vote to rejoin the rest of BC on
year-round UTC−7 was with two weeks of the announcement from Victoria,
and narrowly passed 8–7. Though the question was quickly called a
second time and the decision rescinded, it was at least facially
reasonable at the time, as Alberta had not yet made similar moves yet.
RDEK's vote on Friday was 12-3 in favor of remaining in sync with
Alberta's time (knowing that time is MDT / CST / UTC-06).
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/months-debate-east-kootenay-stop-013459473.html
https://www.myeastkootenaynow.com/57499/news/municipal-news/rdek/the-time-has-come-no-more-switching-clocks-for-east-kootenay/
https://www.columbiavalleypioneer.com/spring-ahead-fall-back-no-more-in-rdek/
https://kimberleybulletin.com/2026/08/14/rdek-board-endorses-move-to-permanent-mountain-daylight-savings-time/
https://calgaryherald.com/news/regional-district-east-kootenay-daylight-time
The news of the decision seems to have reached the media. With the
public engagement and fair warning that a decision would be made I do
not expect to see the August decision rescinded.
Given the total number of responses (~14,000) relative to the affected
area's population (~73,000), I would not be so quick to assume people
there are "unaware" of the state of things or the trade-offs.
And it can't be understated: What ends up a no-op for tzdata also
means a mental no-op for most folks living in the area. Both the
boundaries and deltas between time observances remain the same
regionally as they have been, so locals who are already familiar with
navigating the provincial border, the time zone border, or both don't
need to adjust their existing thinking in that regard. Sure, it may
look a bit weird when zooming out on a global map, but fundamentally
time zones came about to coordinate society on a more granular, local
level than that — so if it will work for the locals, that's all that
matters.
The worst locals will need to do is to make sure the time on their
networked devices is set to an America/Vancouver or America/Edmonton
based time zone instead of America/Los_Angeles or America/Denver.
Hopefully there will be more information via the CBC and in local media
when consumer/public facing operating systems have been adjusted to
allow selecting the appropriate "new" time zone.
One last change to keep networked devices in sync with locally observed
time.
