Canada Time Zone Change: Microsoft’s Answer Was Bogota, Saskatchewan and Yukon

Manitoba’s new time zone, in Microsoft’s workaround tables, is Bogota. Alberta’s is Saskatchewan, and British Columbia’s is Yukon, unless the thing being scheduled repeats, in which case British Columbia’s is Arizona. The provinces stayed where they were. Their calendars are running on borrowed clocks. The software that keeps them had not caught up with the decision to stop changing them, and the official advice, for days, was to pick another place with the right offset and use its name instead.

The borrowing is written into KB5134344, Microsoft’s master guidance page for the change, last updated on 2 November. Its confirmed-impact table gives Power Automate one set of borrowed zones and Fabric another. Teams Events, added to the same page on 2 November, gives Manitoba a third: Eastern Time in the United States and Canada. Depending on which product held the meeting, the same office could be on Bogota time in one Microsoft product, Eastern time in another, and Manitoba time in a third, with all three pointing at the same hour on the wall.

A calendar entry stores a local time and the name of a zone, and the zone name carries the rules for when that time moves. An entry made in May for 9 a.m. on 4 November, under the old Vancouver rules, was stored as a moment that falls at 10 a.m. once the rules change and the offset stays at UTC-7 instead of dropping to UTC-8. Google’s help page uses a room to show what follows. One team booked a room for 9 a.m. under the old definitions and now sees 10 a.m. A second team booked the same room for 9 a.m. under the new ones. Moving the first booking back can lose the room.

Monomette, writing on Reddit’s r/sysadmin, put it this way: “half the team miss our morning meeting because they still have time changes but head office doesn’t.” Every Outlook appointment sat an hour out. People were ringing to say their computers had not picked up the new zone. Microsoft’s page asks users to select the new zone and review their meetings, and asks administrators to plan for a tool due on 4 November that covers only meetings that do not repeat. Another administrator on the same forum, writing as thewunderbar, put his verdict in one short sentence: “The Microsoft guidance has been terrible on this.” He had spent the week running a script of his own, and described it in the same post: “I have roughly 900 lines of powershell that i’m running this week to set everyone’s outlook to the correct time zone.” Other administrators on the same forum reported scripts of their own.

The Canada time zone change arrived in instalments, which is part of why the software kept arriving after it. British Columbia announced on 2 March that it would stay on daylight saving time after its clocks went forward on 8 March, and gave people and businesses eight months to prepare for a 1 November that would bring no change. Alberta moved to permanent UTC-6 on 18 June. The Northwest Territories followed on 21 August. Manitoba announced its decision on 17 September, signed the proclamation on 23 September, and brought its new Manitoba Standard Time into force on 31 October, the day before the clocks elsewhere went back. The IANA time zone database, which nearly every operating system uses to know these rules, recorded each move in a separate release, in April, July, September and again in September. A device carrying anything older than the last of those four releases still expected the clocks to fall back.

Alberta’s voters had already answered a version of this question. In the 2021 referendum, 50.2 percent of voters said no to year-round daylight saving time, after a 2019 engagement in which 91 percent of 141,280 responses had favoured it. British Columbia’s framework dated to a 2019 amendment. The software precedent was Chile in September 2022. The government put its daylight saving switch back by a week so people could vote on a new constitution on 4 September, and Microsoft warned that Windows clocks, scheduled tasks, file timestamps, Teams and Outlook meetings and the Kerberos authentication protocol could all land an hour out. Four years later, the same warning arrived in the form of a guidance page that kept growing after the change it described. Its change log adds products and workarounds on 27, 28, 29 and 30 October, and again on 2 November.

Google Calendar shifted most affected events on its own. Its help page says Google Calendar automatically shifted most affected events back by one hour to their original local times during October. The shift covered single events and recurring events without later exceptions. A warning badge marked the ones it could not be sure about, with a one-click move on the web version only. Guests had to confirm again after an event moved. Microsoft’s fix is manual. The person who organised a meeting changes it, nobody else can, and changing a recurring series wipes out any single occurrence that had been moved, so those have to be put back by hand. Google’s own page warns that a meeting fixed on the web can still show the wrong time in Exchange, and that a meeting organised in Outlook has to be checked with its organiser.

Teams Rooms on Windows showed a time an hour behind Windows until Edge and WebView2 were updated. Teams Auto Attendant might not have had the right zones on 1 November and had to be changed by hand. SharePoint On-Premises was due an update on 10 November, and Power Pages, where server dates could sit an hour out, had a service fix with a 12 December milestone. Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations needed hotfixes targeted at 31 October, the day before the change, and then needed each affected user to pick the new zone. The page lists free/busy information and the Work Hours and Location feature in Outlook on the web and the new Outlook as still under investigation. One row on the same page gives Dynamics 365 Business Central updates starting on 31 October and finishing on 29 October. Devices on Windows versions Microsoft no longer supports will not get the time zone update at all.

Administrators had already used the borrowed cities in the workaround tables. Mr_Enduring, posting on the same Reddit forum, listed the result in three lines: “BC is now on Yukon time (America/Whitehorse in Linux)”, “Alberta is now on Saskatchewan time (America/Regina)”, “Manitoba is now on Bogota time (America/Bogota)”. Katie Brooks works remotely in Ontario for a company based in Alberta. She manages a team spread across Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, with clients in Manitoba and Ontario. She put the daily arithmetic on Threads in one line: “Ask me how I’m doing remembering who is in what timezone and how many hours apart we are”. British Columbia had promised a smooth, well-co-ordinated transition, and Alberta’s government had said it worked closely with technology providers for months and expected devices to update on their own. Microsoft’s tables and the administrators’ posts agree on the borrowed clocks. Only the administrators’ posts record the week it took to live with them.

A computer with the update installed shows the wrong time if it is set to Pacific Time (US and Canada), because that zone follows the United States rules and fell back on 1 November. The zone itself has to be changed to the new British Columbia, Alberta or Manitoba zone, on every device and in every calendar. Installing the update does not change the setting by itself.