Balloting on Everything from Time of Day to a Fixed Link
Growing awareness of the rewards of referendums gave rise to ballot questions on such diverse controversies as plans for health insurance, ownership of electric power companies, gambling, and Sunday shopping. To shed further light on the wide range of Canadian ballot issues, this chapter offers a sampler of two more – dealing with time and travel.
Deciding the Time of Day by Ballot
As the world’s second-largest country, our experience with Canada’s sprawling share of geography includes trying to blend the artificial “time zones” imposed by humans onto nature’s own alternating seasons.
From east to west, our transcontinental country contains six time zones (Newfoundland Standard, Atlantic Standard, Eastern Standard, Central Standard, Mountain Standard, and Pacific Standard) that put abrupt edges to the “time of day.” From south to north, we also accommodate Earth’s seasonal shifts between the lush Carolinian forest of our southernmost area and the High Arctic latitudes far above the treeline, which bask in twenty-four-hour sunlight in summer and are cloaked with twenty-four-hour darkness in winter. Into this variable mix entered the invention of Daylight Saving Time by which we advance clocks an hour in spring for daylight’s extended run, then set the hands back again one hour in fall, according to a “saving” schedule that itself has even changed. What earlier began on the first Sunday in April is today the second Sunday in March. Daylight Saving no longer ends on the last Sunday of October, but the first Sunday in November.
Imposing an orderly, systematic measuring system leads to efficiency, uniformity, and predictability. Starting from the “zero point” for time and meridians at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, southeast of London, England, Greenwich Mean Time begins the westerly march of hours around the globe, marked off by meridians of longitude. An efficient measuring system should take no account of seas or borders, cities or farming zones, but politics and economics interrupted the plotting of lines. The ninetieth meridian, just west of Thunder Bay, Ontario, being six zones removed from Greenwich, should be a time zone boundary but isn’t. The seventh hour west of Greenwich should start on the 105th meridian, running between Saskatoon and Regina, but was set instead at the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border, the northern part of which is on the 102nd meridian. Why? So that all Saskatchewanians would live in the same time zone. Officials would have a hard time explaining that the neat lines of the province’s borders, themselves an artificial creation, didn’t coincide with another set of imposed lines, since both were being drawn by remote officials. So from the outset, some instinct operated to accommodate human community within the measured boundary lines of land.
From the early 1900s use of Daylight Saving Time, often called “Fast Time,” was encouraged throughout Canada on a voluntary basis.1 But during the First World War, Ottawa increasingly imposed emergency measures, from press censorship, internment camps, conscription, even a “temporary” income tax to pay for the war that is still being collected several wars and a century later. In this context, Parliament enacted legislation in 1918 to impose Daylight Saving Time, also as a temporary war measure. To get the time issue dealt with, Prime Minister Borden’s government had to override strong protests of MPs representing rural constituencies distressed by the adverse economic and social impact of the decision. Ottawa was flooded with “vociferous complaints from farming communities who claimed Daylight Saving Time meant an hour’s work per day lost, as cows could not be milked any earlier and heavy dew on the ground made field work impossible.”2
The practice of Daylight Saving was popular with most city dwellers, however, where people’s separation from nature is greater. Use of electricity for lighting, heating, and operating equipment enabled pushing daytime conditions into the night hours as offices and factories no longer had to shut down with darkness descending, and streetlights and electrified homes added more hours of visible activity to each winter’s night.
Recognizing a political “hot potato,” the federal government heeded the economic case made by farmers — so when the statute came up for renewal after the war, it was repealed. Ottawa, following Laurier’s precedent with prohibition, would use the federal system’s advantage of leaving provinces and municipalities free to adjust the contentious use of Daylight Saving Time to regional and local conditions in whatever way they saw best.
This handoff, however, produced a patchwork of time confusion. Municipalities in western Saskatchewan got the right to switch to nearby Alberta’s Mountain Standard Time, and most did. Then municipalities in the southeastern section of the province gained the option of choosing between Mountain Standard Time like the western part of their province, or Central Standard Time like neighbouring Manitoba. Exercising such an option led to a mixed variety that, to implement, produced a confusing zigzag time-zone boundary jogging “west, north, west, south, west, south, east, south, east, south, west and south, taking Yorkton, Melville, and Estevan an hour away from the rest of the province, until at last it reached the U.S. border and regularity again.”3 Some Saskatchewan cities went to Central Time in summer but ran on Mountain Time in winter, calling this particular hybrid “Mountain Daylight Saving Time.” At one point the only consistent city was Lloydminster, straddling the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, which compromised by staying on Mountain Time all year. Confusion became so great that railway men used special three-handed watches for Saskatchewan runs until finally the exasperated railways solved their problem by operating on Standard Time year-round.
Not only for Saskatchewanians but for Canadians generally, the question of time zones was controversial because switching impacted many aspects of rural life and farming.
The time of day again became a national issue during the Second World War when Mackenzie King’s government took control for the same “wartime necessity” that motivated Robert Borden’s government to do so in the First World War. The Liberals imposed Daylight Saving Time on the whole country for the war’s duration. With the coming of peace and the lapsing of Ottawa’s reign over setting the clocks of the nation, British Columbia’s government filled the vacuum by heeding the wishes of its urban population (with more voters) and continued Daylight Saving Time for the summer months from 1945 until 1952.
All through these postwar years farming communities protested strongly. The Conservative MLA for Delta, Alex Hope, urged that the issue be put directly to the people of British Columbia in a referendum. Having seen how a ballot question could bring finality to a contentious issue, he claimed that farmers “would no longer complain about Daylight Saving Time if the province as a whole voted in favour.”4 Desiring to resolve the controversy, the B.C. government held a ballot question on the matter, with voting held in conjunction with the general election on June 12, 1952. The government also submitted the controversial liquor issue to a provincial vote at the same time.
Support and opposition to Daylight Saving Time divided between urban and rural voters. Neither the Yes or No side formed a campaign organization, nor did the provincial political parties take a stand on the issue. “Nobody is saying anything about Daylight Saving Time in the campaign,” observed Vancouver’s Province about this studied avoidance.
Daylight Saving won with 290,353 ballots cast in favour, 231,008 against. Alex Hope had been correct about the power of a referendum to calm farmers’ protestations. After the vote, Daylight Saving Time was proclaimed under the authority of the Daylight Saving Act, 1919, “without incurring protests from the farming community.”5
Four years later, seeing British Columbia’s success, Saskatchewan hoped a ballot question might resolve its time dilemma, too, and set the stage by enacting the Time Question Plebiscite Act, 1956.
With the province’s easterly and westerly communities not sharing a common time zone, Saskatchewanians puzzled over how to set their clocks, especially because most lacked the railroaders’ three-hand timepieces. They were ready to let the majority view prevail. However, when electors got to the polls, they found the ballot confusing: first, they had to vote for or against Central Standard Time for the whole province, then, second, show their preference for the time to be used in their own locality.
Just over a third of eligible voters cast ballots. When tallied, they showed 101,292 opted for Central Standard Time, 19,380 for Central Daylight Saving, and 83,267 for Mountain Standard — results impossible to interpret in a single policy. Having ineptly posed a ballot question that didn’t force a choice, the government then referred its problem to a legislative committee, accepting its eventual recommendation to put Saskatchewan on Mountain Standard Time in winter and Central Standard Time in summer, a “solution” that split the cabinet, the legislature, and the population.
Next came a provincial statute enabling each municipality to hold local ballot questions on adopting its own time, guaranteeing a further reign of confusion across Saskatchewan. In 1959, to end local freelancing, the act was repealed. By 1962, politically shamed by the railway companies’ decisions to run on a single uniform regime of year-round Standard Time, the matter was again considered by a legislative committee. This one recommended bisecting Saskatchewan into two time zones: Central Standard in the east and Mountain Standard in the west, with numerous exceptions. Today everyone in Saskatchewan operates on Central Standard Time in the summer. In winter, western Saskatchewan is officially on Mountain Standard Time, unless electors by local vote have put their particular municipality on Central Standard Time.
Ballot-box democracy played some role in Saskatchewan’s time saga, but only with about the same success solving the dilemma as all the other methods tried.
Albertans, having been spectators for years of the time wars raging in their neighbouring provinces, went to the polls themselves to decide how best to set their clocks. After the Second World War, when Ottawa again relinquished the time field, a 1948 Alberta statute enforced use of Mountain Standard Time throughout the province. In April 1967, the Social Credit government, in response to pressure from the party’s strong rural base, announced a ballot question on the time question, the first occasion for Albertans to express their choice directly on the issue. The ballot asked, Do you favour province-wide daylight saving time?
When voting ended, overall results were Yes 236,555, No 248,680, representing 48.75 percent in favour of Daylight Saving and 51.25 percent against, split largely along urban-rural lines. Outside Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, and Medicine Hat, the vote overwhelmingly favoured retaining Mountain Standard Time year-round.
That vote, on May 23, 1967, was held in conjunction with a provincial election that returned Alberta’s Social Credit government to office for a ninth term, with a massive majority in the legislature. After four more years of urbanization, increasing pressure mounted on the Socreds to hold a second vote on Daylight Saving Time. Again the same question was posed: Do you favour province-wide daylight saving time? Again the balloting was held in conjunction with a provincial general election — on August 30, 1971.
This time, however, the difference was in the campaign. In 1967 voters had been exposed to a vigorous No campaign, at the end of which No achieved a relatively narrow victory. For 1971 the “Yes for Daylight Saving Society,” having pushed hard to get the referendum, fought even harder for the extra hour.
This round resulted in 386,846 votes for Yes to 242,431 for No. Province-wide Daylight Saving Time had been approved by 61.47 percent of the electorate.
The farmers resigned themselves to the outcome. “I wasn’t surprised by the vote,” said W.D. Lea, president of Unifarm, an official spokesperson for some thirty thousand Alberta farmers. “As farmers, we have a lot of other matters that are more urgent to contend with than Daylight Saving Time.” The vitriol had been drawn from the issue. Everybody who wanted had had their say — twice. On April 25, 1972, Alberta implemented Daylight Saving Time.
The Daylight Saving issue continued ticking in British Columbia where, on August 30, 1972, another ballot question was posed, and like the time referendum two decades earlier, was held in conjunction with a provincial election. Voters were asked, Are you in favour of Pacific Standard Time, including Pacific Daylight Saving Time, as is applicable now throughout the province?
This vote, though provincially sponsored, wasn’t conducted throughout British Columbia but in five northern electoral districts most impacted economically — a variant on the sectoral referendum. The results were 63.38 percent No to 34.24 percent Yes. Such use of a referendum in farming and outlying areas, where economic and social patterns better fitted the rhythm of Standard Time, showed more successfully than in Saskatchewan that the intelligent use of a ballot question — in this case on a regional basis for those directly impacted — can provide appropriate flexibility and address a particular need, akin to holding several by-elections on the same day to fill vacancies in the legislature. It helped, of course, that British Columbia’s geography was also more compatible with this north-south arrangement.
The “time” issue reminds us how governments can’t do things for people without also doing things to people. Some folks were forced to set their clocks by a majority view. In most cases, the grudging acceptance by those who “lost” an hour was grounded in knowing that in a democracy that’s how majority rule works, and that the process at least gave everyone a chance to be heard and be counted.
Balloting About a Bridge to Canada’s Mainland
Of the three island colonies of British North America that are today part of Canada, only one was near enough to the continental mainland to contemplate a tunnel or bridge. Vancouver Island and Newfoundland maintained their coveted separateness with boats and planes, but Prince Edward Island long flirted with the notion of a dual personality as both an island and a piece of the mainland.
The identity of Canada’s smallest province is captured in its official name: Prince Edward Island. Few Islanders know much about Prince Edward himself, but all understand the benefit of crossing water to get to their province and most value their sea moat for keeping people “from away” away. An Islander’s state of being “unto one’s self” has a primordial quality, which is why the political, economic, social, and cultural aspects — not to mention practical transportation realities — of Prince Edward Island’s relationship to the mainland loomed so large for so long.
When Prince Edward Island became a Canadian province in 1873, its Confederation agreement required Ottawa to provide “efficient steam service for the reliable conveyance of mail and passengers between the Island and the Dominion, winter and summer, thus placing the Island in continuous communication with the Intercontinental Railway and the railway system of the Dominion.”6
“Efficient steam service” wasn’t restricted to coal-fired ferries but included the possibility of steam locomotives pulling trains. Indeed, the P.E.I. government had been going broke constructing a provincial railway, and getting bailed out of its debt by the terms of union with Canada gave new lease to the Islanders’ railway dream — as reference to “the railway system of the Dominion” signalled. In 1885 a tunnel under the Northumberland Strait was proposed for better year-round communication and transportation between island and mainland. Planning for this tunnel was carried out in 1895. With the advent in 1917 of an ice-breaking ferry and more reliable year-round service, that project faded. Then other concepts took its place as over the years new plans were touted for reliable transportation to and from the island, including railway and highway tunnels, a bridge, and a causeway. The word reliable was interpreted to rule out airplanes and boats.
The explicit promise of a bridge, or sometimes a tunnel, rose and fell in tidal regularity with the coming and going of election campaigns. Although the introduction of air travel reduced the pressures to actually do anything new — the reliable ferry service was kept modern, while simultaneously preserving the reality of “island” culture — the concept of a “fixed crossing” such as a bridge, causeway, or tunnel emerged again with proposals from both sides of the House of Commons between 1956 and 1965.
In this matter, progress is measured not in days but decades. After federal Liberal Party leader Lester Pearson promised a causeway when he lost the 1962 general election, and a year later, in the 1963 election, repeated the same pledge but this time formed a national government, work on approaches to the causeway began. In 1966 construction started on the bridge-causeway combination itself. This project was terminated in 1968, however, after the costly access roads had been built, because the rapid speed of this project was getting out of hand.
A couple of more decades slipped along unnoticed, then some feasibility studies were made in the 1980s. This work eliminated the causeway on grounds of potential future environmental damage. Next to fade into even darker oblivion was the old railway tunnel idea because, in rethinking that option, someone opined that it wouldn’t provide “a continuous link,” the mantra for this elusive dream, since railways ran on timetables and the intervals between train service were getting much longer. Pragmatists added that a railway tunnel would be neither quieter nor more convenient than the existing ferry service, already paid for and operating efficiently.
During the 1980s, some desultory rounds of discussions took place intermittently, the way the premiers of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick got together in the 1860s, and at intervals since, to discuss Maritime Union; after several days of fine dining and discussion, they returned to their respective capitals in Halifax, Fredericton, and Charlottetown to carry on as before. “Important but not urgent at the present time” was a Maritime view on many issues. Emerging from those 1980s discussions about Prince Edward Island’s future as an island, several public- and private-sector proposals reappeared for a long-ignored “fixed-link” crossing. By 1988, this led to a feasibility study by the Department of Public Works in Ottawa.
The “linking” concept involved a highway either over a bridge or through a tunnel. The federal government asked seven Canadian construction consortiums to submit plans and prices. Ottawa thought a likely cost would be $1 billion and estimated a half decade for construction to complete the fourteen-kilometre link between Borden on the island and Cape Tormentine on New Brunswick’s coast. A fixed-link project could have significant long-lasting effects on the lifestyle and economy of Prince Edward Islanders, and on the biophysical environments of the island, the mainland, and the Northumberland Strait.
In mid-November 1987, federal government officials called for tenders to build the crossing. In conjunction with that, they launched “information meetings” across Prince Edward Island. Residents could ask questions about the crossing proposal and submit written comments on survey cards. Premier Joe Ghiz believed Islanders weren’t getting a chance through this typical “public consultation” process of contemporary government in Canada to express their views adequately.
A week later, on November 23, 1987, the Liberal premier announced a province-wide vote. “After monitoring the federal government’s version of providing information to Islanders,” said Ghiz at a Charlottetown press conference announcing the plebiscite, “I am now prepared to say that a more effective process of consultation, debate, and exchange of opinion must take place.”
Fortunately, the premier could utilize the carefully established ballot-question procedures in Prince Edward Island’s existing Plebiscite Act. Islanders long embraced the value of plebiscitary democracy, having marked ballots to settle questions a number of times as far back as 1878. Had the province not already had on its statute books enabling legislation for such a vote, Joe Ghiz couldn’t have acted with such dispatch and confidence.
Voting would take place January 18, 1988. Islanders would be asked whether they supported plans to build a physical connection to Canada’s mainland. Rather than choosing between a specific structure such as bridge or tunnel, the issue was to be framed generically as to whether any “fixed link” was desired.
The fixed-link plebiscite did exactly what this democratic procedure is designed to accomplish. In the words of historian Douglas Baldwin, it “forced Islanders to think about their future.”7 This thinking turned on positive and negative economic dimensions and the cultural identity of island life. A fixed link would benefit agriculture through cheaper transportation, affect fishing with possible environmental damage, and help tourism through easier access. However, it could harm tourism by altering the uniqueness of “island” charm. Entering the New Year 1988, the issue aroused as much controversy as it had whenever contemplated in all prior decades.
People debated what really constituted economic and cultural “progress,” with the opposing Yes and No groups choosing names that illustrated this dichotomy. The progressive pro-link supporters called themselves “Islanders for a Better Tomorrow,” and the proud anti-link advocates defiantly dubbed themselves “Friends of the Island.” Proponents of a stronger economy and a better materialistic lifestyle, notes Baldwin, conflicted with defenders of the environment and the “Island way of life.” Certainly the ballot question didn’t “create” this division, but it did give the dual nature of Prince Edward Island public expression and allowed it to be subjected to open discussion and reappraisal.
The compact province’s relatively small number of residents — its population slightly larger in number than that of Oshawa, Ontario, and considerably smaller than that of Burnaby, British Columbia — means residents are able to pay close attention to the career of events within the identifiable terrain of their water-bound community. They didn’t need the statutory five-week campaign to reach a verdict. Premier Ghiz told me, when we met in Charlottetown to review the legal side of things, that for the sake of families, news reporters, and campaigners, he was glad the Christmas and New Year’s break provided a respite from the increasingly repetitive campaigning.
In the January 18, 1988, voting, Islanders voted 59 percent in favour of a fixed-link crossing. The project then progressed through work on the engineering studies, proceedings for environmental impact reviews, and the launching and adjudication of several court challenges.
Driving across the completed “fixed link” disappoints those expecting grand views, because the outer sides of the traffic lanes face solid bridge walls high enough to block the scenery. On windswept wintry days, the same barriers shield against blustery gales that would play havoc with motor vehicles.
As for an alternate “reliable” journey across the Northumberland Strait, the ferries are still running, one year-round and a second operating in summer. Islanders boarding them have, since January 18, 1988, an even better sense of just who they are, and what their island means to them. Joe Ghiz was satisfied his people had had a proper means for debating all points of view, then reaching a collective decision. The character of their island is of abiding interest to all the people, not just their elected representatives or government officials.