this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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British Columbia basically did a similar thing by declaring permanent daylight savings time because, according to the premier, they're no longer going to wait for the US to move as well before moving themselves.
Except now the situation is objectively worse than it was before, because BC is geographically in the UTC-8 zone, but permanent Pacific Daylight Time is the same as permanent Mountain Standard Time (UTC-7). Except they don't call it Mountain Standard Time in BC, they stubbornly continue to insist they're in the UTC-8 zone. Except they don't call it "Pacific Daylight Time" either, they call it just "Pacific Time". No "Daylight". Despite the fact that their standard time is what the rest of North America calls Mountain Time.
They had four good choices, and chose none of them:
Decent idea, rubbish execution.
They probably just saved some paperwork. Anyway, all people care were the time zone difference, not name
The name causes confusion. Let me give you this example. What time UTC would "17:00 PT" be?
That question depends now not only on what time of year it is, but also where. "Pacific Time" now no longer uniquely identifies a single timekeeping scheme.
What I understood was PT is UTC-7, PDT is UTC-7 and PST is UTC-8, am I right? I am guessing in Canada you all were refering to PST and PDT as 'pacific time' and that causes confusion?
"Pacific Time" means "whatever the civil time is in the Pacific Time Zone, accounting for daylight saving time". So that would be 23:04 (UTC-7) as of writing.
If today's date were instead 30 December, "Pacific Time" would be 22:04 (UTC-8) in Washington, Oregon, and California, while it would be 23:04 (UTC-7) in British Columbia and Yukon. Both would be called "Pacific Time" despite not being the same time, and both being on standard time.
Ah right, got it.
Weird not to have any coordination at all. Another example I found - CST can simultaneously mean Central Standard Time (North America), China Standard Time, or Cuba Standard Time.
Why call it anything? UTC-7 or -8 are explicit, less confusing internationally & shorter
Because UTC-7 and UTC-8 are also wrong. The label "Pacific Time" means, in the United States and Mexico, the civil time standard that observes standard time at UTC-8 and daylight saving time at UTC-7. You cannot call this standard merely "UTC-8" because then it's wrong half of the year.
It is important to note that by calling year-round UTC-7 "Pacific Time", British Columbia and Yukon are the ones stepping out of the programme to do something idiosyncratic. The rest of the Pacific Time Zone (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, California, and Baja California) has a greater population than the entirety of Canada. There are approximately 56 million residents of the non-Canadian portion of the Pacific Time Zone, where standard time is UTC-8, compared to 5 million in the Canadian portion, which is UTC-7.
No that's what I mean, once you have a fixed timezone there is no need for naming that timezone anything at all, it can be referred to by its UTC offset
It's something that regularly gets under my skin when people announce events like this:
Instead of all of this, a single UTC offset would be so much clearer
Looks like it had the desired effect of pissing off US people. 😄