Ten in the morning seems a little late for sunrise.

But that is what late December will bring to Haida Gwaii under British Columbia’s new permanent daylight time. In Skidegate, the latest sunrise will be around 10:02 a.m. By then, many people will have been at work or school for hours.

I welcome the end of changing our clocks twice a year. But ending the clock changes and choosing which time to keep are two different decisions. I think the province got the first one right and the second one wrong.

To explain why, it helps to remember what our clocks were originally trying to measure.

Before standard time, communities commonly kept local solar time. Noon was tied to the sun crossing the local meridian, reaching its highest point in the sky.

The result was that noon in one town was not necessarily noon in the next. Travel west, and local clocks fell behind. Travel east, and they moved ahead.

That worked reasonably well until people started moving quickly enough for the differences to become troublesome. Railways needed timetables that made sense across networks, rather than a collection of local times.

North American railways adopted coordinated time in 1883. The following year, an international conference recommended Greenwich as the prime meridian for longitude and world timekeeping, helping establish the familiar model of 24 hourly time zones with reference meridians 15 degrees apart.

The actual boundaries developed around railways, commerce, communities and political borders. Today’s time zones have an astronomical foundation, but their boundaries and offsets are human decisions.

B.C.’s move to permanent daylight time followed a 2019 online consultation that received 223,273 responses. More than 93 per cent supported permanent daylight saving time.

That sounds decisive, but the question offered a choice between continuing seasonal clock changes and adopting permanent daylight time. Permanent standard time was not offered as an equal third option.

There are reasons to prefer standard time. Sleep researchers, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, favour permanent standard time because it better aligns our schedules with natural light and our body clocks. Morning light matters.

Here on Haida Gwaii, geography makes the question particularly interesting. Our northern latitude gives us short winter days, and our far western longitude means the sun already reaches its midday position late by the provincial clock.

B.C.’s permanent UTC−7 corresponds to a reference meridian of 105 degrees west. That meridian lies in Saskatchewan, east of Prince Albert, roughly 1,700 kilometres from here.

Haida Gwaii sits at approximately 132 degrees west. Under the provincial clock, our average solar noon falls around 1:48 p.m.

So here is a proposal: Haida Gwaii Standard Time.

We could establish a year-round time zone centred on 132 degrees west, with an offset of UTC−8:48. Our clocks would stay put throughout the year, and average solar noon would fall at noon.

What would that look like?

Around the winter solstice in Skidegate, sunrise would be approximately 8:13 a.m. and sunset 3:43 p.m. Around the summer solstice, sunrise would be approximately 3:32 a.m. and sunset 8:31 p.m.

The obvious option would be to adopt permanent Pacific Standard Time, UTC−8. My proposal goes a step further by aligning our clocks with our longitude.

This would introduce some inconvenience. While modern timekeeping devices can represent an offset like UTC−8:48, we would remain one hour and 48 minutes behind our neighbours in B.C., making mainland appointments and meetings a little less convenient to calculate.

But coordination is only one consideration. Our daily relationship with daylight deserves a place in the discussion too. Haida Gwaii has the luxury of being a distant shore, requiring a flight or a ferry to arrive. We can afford to centre our time around whatever meridian we choose.

Perhaps a return to permanent standard time would be enough. Perhaps a time zone centred on the islands is worth considering. Either way, ending seasonal clock changes should open a conversation about which time serves us best.

And UTC−8:48 would have one undeniable advantage.

When people ask about running on island time, we could finally tell them exactly how much.