#35 Raith, ON: Time Travel for the Chronologically Challenged

I just assumed that all the Atlantic provinces were miniscule compared to their western siblings.  One of the geographical surprises I had on this journey was how big the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is.  To drive right across it from Cape Spear to the western border with Quebec is the same distance as from Raith, Ontario to Yoho National Park in BC.  2130 kilometers.  That second drive involves five provinces and three time zones. It starts in the Eastern Time Zone, then passes all the way through Central and ends at the west end of Mountain.


Not far out of Raith I made a rather abrupt impulse stop where the highway crosses into the Central Time Zone - the last of many time changes of this journey.  As we stretched our legs, we noticed a plaque honoring a certain Sir Sandford Fleming - one of the brightest knives in the shed.  That might be a mixed metaphor but then, what Fleming gave to Canada (and the world) was also quite an eclectic mix.  He designed the world's first postage stamp containing a picture - Canada's Threepenny Beaver.  He decided it was important to connect Canada and Australia with an undersea communications cable and then made it happen.  That was in 1902 by the way - a little ahead of the World Wide Web.  When the Alpine Club of Canada was started in Winnipeg (the flattest place on earth), Sir Sandford was named it's first honorary president.  He charted a route over the Yellowhead Pass for Canada's first transcontinental railway.  Those things are all pretty cool but they're not what made the good knight really famous.


Fleming had a problem. How could these railways, which he was working on, keep a schedule when every place on earth followed a different time?  His solution?  A Standard Time in which the whole world became a gigantic clock with 24 time zones.  That ended a lot of confusion.  But not everywhere.  Take the drive across Newfoundland and Labrador for example.


The Newfoundland Time Zone is offset by only half an hour from its provincial neighbors for starters.  You may have seen the prophetic placard: The World Will End at 12:00.  12:30 in Newfoundland.  The ferry that takes you from Newfoundland to Labrador actually terminates in the very tip of Quebec ... in the Atlantic time zone.  A five minute drive gets you into Labrador and onto Newfoundland time again.  But another couple of hours down the road everyone has switched their clocks the 30 minutes back to Atlantic time even though officially the whole province of Newfoundland and Labrador is in the same time zone.  AAAAAHH.  Make it stop.  But time waits for no man.

For someone who is under-skilled in the discipline of resetting a dashboard clock, the safest place to live is in Saskatchewan (preferably in the town of Fleming, named after Sir you-know-who.)  It's the only province in Canada that avoids the semi-annual time jump, from the past to the future and back, known as Daylight Savings Time.  When that decision was made the people of Saskatchewan compared DST to cutting one end off a blanket and sewing it to the other end to get a longer blanket.  And nobody's that dumb.  Well, maybe one person.  Hank Yarbo, from Dog River, Saskatchewan.  In one episode of Corner Gas, Hank tries to avoid paying a parking ticket by changing his watch 12 hours into the future when parking is free.  If you agree with CTV that watching Corner Gas is 'time well wasted', here's a link to the whole episode (It will also be a tooney well wasted.):

No Time Like the Presents

If you can't justify spending your time on that kind of frivolity, there may still be a way.  Turn your clock back one hour.  The show is only 30 minutes long so you'll still come out half an hour ahead.  But don't thank me for that gift of time.  Thank Sir Sandford Fleming.






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