ATIKOKAN — A local councillor says it’s time for Atikokan to switch time zones year-round.
Gordon Martin raised the issue at a Feb. 9 committee of the whole meeting, arguing that the town should be permanently in Eastern Time, along with Thunder Bay and points east.
“I feel like times have changed and Atikokan hasn’t,” he said in an interview with Newswatch after the meeting.
Atikokan is technically located in the Central Time zone, but doesn’t change its clocks in accordance with Daylight Saving Time. Effectively, that means it’s aligned with Eastern Standard Time during the fall and winter months. When clocks elsewhere “spring forward,” it stays put, placing it in Central Daylight Time for that part of the year.
All of that is causing more confusion than necessary, especially with more and more services being offered virtually and remotely and many of them being provided from Thunder Bay, Martin said, adding that the town’s population is aging, also necessitating more trips to the Lakehead for medical appointments.
“Let’s face it, we’re connected greatly to the Eastern Time zone, and, practically everything we do is east of us,” he said at the Feb. 9 meeting. “All of our electronic devices … phones, tablets, watches, even our vehicles, are constantly switching from one time to another time zone as we’re travelling.”
“We’re constantly trying to figure out what time it is where we’re going — are we going to be late for our meetings? Are we going to be early for our meetings?”
A frequently asked questions section on the Atikokan tourism website says the time zone peculiarity is because the town “chose not to observe the time change years ago because of the mine operations and hasn’t seen the need to change it since.”
“We’re living in the digital age, we’re doing virtual meetings, we’re doing electronic medical records,” Martin told Newswatch. “We’re travelling to Thunder Bay for flights to various places.”
“I think it’s time to look at the time zone as a whole.”
That, he said, means examining why any of Ontario is in Central Time at all.
“We’re all in Ontario, we’re all joined kind of at the hip,” Martin said. “I think the bigger picture is here, maybe we should consider asking for the time zone line to be drawn to the Ontario-Manitoba border.”
He said an exception could be communities much closer to the provincial boundary that are more closely connected to Manitoba. Martin said, for example, all of Minnesota is in the same time zone.
Some around the council table at the meeting agreed with Martin’s concerns, particularly about how switching time zones affects Atikokan. Council ultimately asked administration to prepare a report with more information for a future meeting.
This isn’t the first time the issue has been brought up, Coun. Elizabeth Shine told the meeting. Shine, a long-time member of council, reiterated her support for a change to follow Eastern Time year-round.
Other councillors at the meeting said it’s not necessary and that it’s been voted on locally before with no change. Martin said he understands that people can resist change.
Atikokan’s CAO Jason Young cautioned that time zones are ultimately a provincial decision and, even getting local consensus via a referendum requires proper steps be taken around public meetings and timelines. Also, he said, for any referendum results to be valid, voter turnout must be at least 50 per cent.
“All that will do is allow us to petition the province to say, ‘there’s a real want here that we want to change it,’” Young said, adding that complicating matters is that Ontario passed a bill in 2020 to do away with the biannual time changes and put the province permanently on Daylight Saving Time.
However, that’s contingent on Quebec and New York State following suit. If it does ever happen, Young said, under the current time zones map, that provincial change would put Atikokan permanently in Central Time, not Eastern.
Martin told Newswatch he knows the issue won’t be decided locally but still feels it’s important to bring up.
“It’s not going to get voted on, there won’t be a referendum,” he said. “But I think it’s time to start the conversation about why is the time zone where it is.”
“I feel like I needed to say something about it.”
