by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

For the next few days Montrealers will be able to finish their afternoons in brightness, stroll home in daylight, window shop into shiny panes of glass and fix supper bathed in natural light-all because the fiery, life-sustaining ball disappears over the horizon at around 6. But the pleasure won't last-thanks in part to a questionable practice supported by nobody's sure who-after October 25. The luxury of 6 o'clock sunsets will be shelved until March 16, almost five whole months away.

Switching from Daylight Saving Time to Eastern Standard Time every fall is a major contributor to afternoon winter darkness in Montreal. On October 26, darkness will set in at 4:52 p.m. and each afternoon shrinks until the crepuscular days of December, when nighttime starts around 4:10 p.m.

Falling back off DST impacts other cities far less than here: New York's earliest sunset comes 17 minutes after ours, Toronto's shortest afternoon clocks in at 29 minutes longer than Montreal's and Miami's earliest winter sunset occurs a full 77 minutes after we've gone dark.

It's worth noting that Daylight Saving Time was first dreamt up by Ben Franklin in 1784, 20 years after he left Montreal, and first implemented in 1916 Europe to save wartime fuel consumption. It was a good idea then, it's a good idea now. Why not just stick to it?

Dark daze

Especially since the gloomy practice of setting back the clocks is reflected in an ever-growing pile of research detailing the damage that it can cause. Studies have linked the lack of afternoon light to, among other things, depression, Seasonal Affective Disorder, increased vehicular mortality rates and higher crime rates.

Dr. Henry Olders, a psychiatrist at the Jewish General Hospital, is one of the most recent to chime in on the clock issue with his recently unveiled study "Average Sunrise Time Predicts Depression Prevalence," published this summer in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. The data suggests that adopting Eastern DST year-round or joining the Atlantic time zone would reduce Quebec's high rates of depression. "Short winter days aren't necessarily a cause of depression," he says. "Iceland in the winter has shorter days than London, but there's still three times more depression [per capita] in London."

Olders instead points to data that suggests that excessive rapid-eye-movement (REM)-the sheet-tugging moments of dream sleep-is linked to depression. The body tends to fall into REM most intensely at the onset of light. Thus the dark reward of the end of DST is not only shorter afternoons and confounded circadian rhythms but also increased risk of depression-a result of sleeping while your body thinks it's daytime.

Olders has more suspicions about the damage wrought by our current time management decisions that leave us more vulnerable than places in our time zone west of here. "Due to our placement in the eastern part of the time zone, the sun passes us 25 minutes earlier on the clock than Toronto, which causes our bodies to think we're sleeping well into the morning."

He's not the only scientist who figures that monkeying with the short arm of the clock might harm our heads. Mariana Figueiro, program director of the Lighting Research Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, points out that rigging the clock so that all daylight takes place during working hours will result in a lot of people going long periods without enjoying any natural light.

"If you don't have the chance to be exposed to natural light during the day, it could lead to depression. You're fighting what your body is saying," says Figueiro. Her research suggests that a little after-work light could lead to being in a better state of mind. "Daylight is very powerful. A half-hour walk during the winter is all the body really needs," she says.

An English Canada plot?

In Canada, provinces are free to set their time zones at will, and in Quebec the dossier is on the lap of the Justice Ministry, whose press agents simply referred questions to factual information on their Web site.

Unlike Canada's three westernmost provinces-which have held five referenda on the questions of the clock since 1952-Quebecers have never been consulted on the matter of our time management. Casual conversation suggests that many Montrealers dread the practice of shortening the afternoons for the benefit of longer mornings.

So who exactly supports our clock management? It has been said that parents of schoolchildren prefer it to be light outside in the morning rather than in the afternoon because they don't want their children going to school in the dark. But it's not exactly a hot issue, according to English Montreal School Board press rep Mike Cohen, who says that he's never heard parents or officials discuss the subject.

The labour unions aren't behind it either. Longtime labour boss Arthur Sanborn tells the Mirror that, "I've never heard it discussed once since I started in the labour movement in 1980."

Studies have linked the time switch to increased traffic accidents, but Transports Québec rep Maria Soteriades also says that, to her knowledge, it's never been analyzed, discussed or debated within the ministry. Ditto for the City of Montreal, which does not have an official stance on the subject.

So who likes switching the clocks then? Is there a powerful lobby of newspaper-delivery boys, early morning joggers and morning radio show hosts secretly calling the shots? Fingers are sometimes pointed at farmers. In the U.S., farm states lobbied against extending DST in the past, in spite of such benefits as significantly lowered energy consumption (homes require less electric lighting in the afternoon) and lower crime (brighter afternoons reduces burglaries as it reduces the daytime darkness).

But if Quebec's growers and pickers are pulling the strings on this, they're denying it. A rep from the giant UPA farm union and the Milk Producers Association both say that they not only have no position on the subject, it has never been officially discussed.

Blame America

The real reason Canada's provinces refuse to switch to more enlightened practices is that we want to be in synch with the States, says physicist Rob Douglas, from the Time and Frequency Standards Group at Canada's National Research Council. Although Canada's railway scheduler Sir Sanford Fleming pioneered Standard Time in 1879 (it was universally adopted five years later), we've become a slavish follower to American practices of the clock, even though the DST issue affects the States far less dramatically than it does Canada.

"When the oil crisis hit in the '70s, the U.S. decided it would use DST for one winter to save energy, but Canada decided we wouldn't do anything," says Douglas. "Suddenly we had to add or subtract an hour when having to deal with places that we'd been on the same time with all our lives. Canadians disliked it so much that, even though there was unanimity among the provinces in 1986 during the Meech Lake era-they all agreed it would be better to start DST earlier and end it later-the provinces remembered how much voters hated being on different time than the States. We asked the U.S., ‘Please [extend DST].' You can imagine how much influence this had on Congress."

Don't expect the U.S. to change their time practices. For example, California passed a law in May 2001 that would have put it on year-round DST, but it was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.

Maritime is sunny time

Dr. Henry Olders believes that Quebec could separate from the Eastern Time Zone in spite of our neighbours. "Changing our time zone might make business communications a bit more problematic, but nowadays, a lot is done by e-mail rather by phone and time zones are a fact of life," he says. "We don't do less business with Asia or Japan because of our time differences. We're used to time zone differences. It's not a big deal any longer."

Quebec is currently divided. The area east of the 63rd meridian west, on Quebec's north shore, is already in the Atlantic Time Zone. Hooking the rest of us Quebecers with Atlantic Time would unite us with towns like Blanc-Sablon, on the Labrador border, where an administrator in the mayor's office, Rosita Jones, explains that living on the edge of Atlantic isn't so bad. "You go 10 minutes down the road and you're in a different time zone [Eastern], but we're used to it."

In case the gloomy p.m.s are a result of a secret rural agenda to keep the mornings bright, Olders suggests that country-dwellers lighten up. "What does a farmer care what time it is? One hundred years ago he wouldn't even have a clock, he'd look at the sky and know the time by looking how high the sun was."