Canada timezones (2007)

[Paul Eggert]

"Chris Walton" <Chris.Walton at telus.com> writes:

Wow, thanks for all those references!  You did a lot of legwork.  I'll
fold them into the "northamerica" comments.

>   http://www.assnat.qc.ca/eng/37legislature2/Projets-loi/Publics/06-a002.htm

This reference has some extra bits of information that prompted me to
fill in one of our long list of TODO items, namely time in far east
Quebec.

The reference says that Quebec observes EST/EDT if you are west of 63
degrees West longitude, or are in "the territory of Municipalite
regionale de comte de Minganie".  As I understand it from
http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/ and Wikipedia, this territory straddles the
meridian in question.

It also says that Quebec observes AST if you are "east of the meridian
of 63 degrees West longitude" or "in the territory of the Listuguj
reserve" (which is west of that meridian -- evidently this is an
exception to the general EST/EDT rule); and that during summer you
observe ADT if you are "in the Iles-de-la-Madeleine" or "in the
territory of the Listuguj reserve".

>From this we can deduce that if you are in Quebec east of 63 degrees
W., and are not in the MRC Miganie, and are not in the
Iles-de-la-Madeleine, and are not in the territory of the Listuguj
reserve, then you observe AST all year.  This matches information we
already have from Matthews and Vincent (1998), and I just now
confirmed this from a quite detailed web page from the Quebec
department of justice
<http://www.justice.gouv.qc.ca/english/publications/generale/temps-regl-1-a.htm>.

With all these seemingly authoritative defacto and dejure references,
we should have a Zone for this AST-only region.  The 2001 Census of
Canada lists Blanc-Sablon (pop 1201) as the most populous in this
region, so I will propose adding a new zone America/Blanc-Sablon for
it.  For lack of better historical info I'll suggest something
like this:

Zone America/Blanc-Sablon -3:48:28 -       LMT     1884
                          -4:00    Canada  A%sT    1970
                          -4:00    -       AST

Evidently the folks in Listuguj prefer to sync with New Brunswick, and
I suspect they can use America/Moncton; similarly the folks in Les
Iles-de-la-Madeleine prefer Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia time
and can use America/Halifax.