Having grown up somewhere northern that doesn't follow DST (Saskatchewan) I never really understood this argument. Winter months you get so little sunlight anyways I don't really see how it would make too much of a difference.
Mind you this could be because of where I grew up, but moving to somewhere that follows DST I always saw it more as an inconvenience than anything else.
Essentially DST is making everyone wake up an hour early everyday for 7-8 months. I’d rather just let the people who want the “extra” hour of sunlight in the evening get up early. Our bodies sync with the earth’s clock and not what we set. (Also 1-hr timezones are not sufficient. We need 30 minute time zones as well. People in the westernmost US, for example, have an early start. DST makes it much much earlier.)
It is not really practical to try to run one's life an hour ahead of the schedule of society, as set by things like business hours, transit schedules, and the times of public events and performances. This is why I personally would be sorry to lose DST where I live, even though it is an ugly hack.
I live in the middle part of alberta and I'm in the same boat, and during the recent referrendum on switching to DST I couldn't believe the amount of "But in the northern part of the province sunrise will be too late for kids going to school!" as if:
- ...Sunrise wasn't already too late for kids going to school anyways, since Because Capitalism school has to start before work does,
- ..."Sunrise" is a fixed point when you get any further north from me in the winter. It's more like a couple hours of varying degrees of "glowing horizon" centered around "sunrise" to begin with.
Mind you this could be because of where I grew up, but moving to somewhere that follows DST I always saw it more as an inconvenience than anything else.