Lenovo Smart Clock shows wrong time in Canada after DST end

Why the clocks went wrong

A large part of western Canada has dropped the twice-yearly clock change. British Columbia moved its clocks forward for the last time on 8 March and now stays on summer time year-round. Alberta, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories and part of northwestern Ontario followed on 1 November by not turning clocks back. Saskatchewan has not changed its clocks since 1966, and Yukon since 2020.

The Smart Clock units, however, set themselves back one hour as if nothing had changed. Google had warned on 23 October that Android phones that were not up to date might wrongly move their clocks back, and that some Google Calendar events could shift by an hour. Smaller devices depend on updates from their manufacturers, and the Smart Clock Essential still runs Google Assistant, without the migration to Gemini.

Workaround and precedent

No fix has been announced. Some users work around the problem by setting their home address in another region whose time zone matches the real local time, at the cost of losing local weather information on the device.

The episode is not unprecedented: when Jordan adopted permanent summer time in 2022 and Mexico dropped clock changes in 2023, some connected displays also showed the wrong time, and corrections took several months.

It is also a warning for Europe, where the end of clock changes, voted by the European Parliament in 2019, remains stalled. Alarm clocks, ovens, cars and other devices that no longer receive updates would face the same issue. In Quebec, Premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has just said he intends to abolish clock changes too, which would put the province's Smart Clock owners in the same position.