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Outlook meetings in BC, Alberta and Manitoba can be an hour off

Three provinces stopped changing clocks on November 1. Microsoft says old meetings won't move by themselves, and some fixes are weeks away.

By 28creation Desk 3 min read

The short read

Microsoft tells Power Automate users in Manitoba to set their flows to Bogota time for now.

  • British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba stopped changing clocks on November 1. Existing Outlook meetings keep the old zone until someone changes them.

What you can do with this

If you have staff in those provinces, have each meeting organizer switch to the new Outlook time zone and re-save recurring series. You avoid people turning up an hour early or late.

A closed red leather diary with an orange pencil slid under its strap, on a white background.
Photo: Philippe Alès, CC BY-SA 4.0

British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba did not turn their clocks back on November 1, 2026, and Microsoft 365 did not fully keep up. Microsoft’s guidance page says existing Outlook events “don’t migrate” to the new zones. If your team meets with those provinces, meetings can show an hour off, and some automations run an hour early or late.

The Register reported on November 2 that admins are fixing calendars by hand. Microsoft first published its guidance (KB 5134344) on October 26, less than a week before the change, and last updated it on November 2.

Three provinces, three new fixed offsets

British Columbia now stays on UTC-07:00, Alberta on UTC-06:00 and Manitoba on UTC-05:00, Microsoft’s page says. The Northwest Territories follow Alberta, and northwestern Ontario follows Manitoba.

Outlook stores each meeting with a time zone. An event booked earlier in the old “Pacific Time” zone keeps following it, and that zone fell back an hour on November 1. Microsoft’s own fix is manual: pick the new zone, such as “(UTC-07:00) Pacific Time (British Columbia)”, then open each event and change its zone, its Outlook support article says.

The fixes land on different dates

  • Exchange Online: a PowerShell cmdlet for non-recurring meetings is planned for November 4. The fix for recurring meetings has no date.
  • Power Automate and Azure Automation: flows using US-linked zones drift by an hour. Until new province IDs work, Microsoft maps Alberta to Saskatchewan time, BC to Yukon (Arizona for schedule triggers) and Manitoba to SA Pacific Standard Time, which is Bogota.
  • Fabric and Power BI: the new zones are missing, with the same stopgaps and no date.
  • SharePoint Server: an update is due November 10.
  • Power Pages: server-formatted dates can be an hour off until a fix with a December 12 milestone.

Free/busy and Work Hours and Location in Outlook on the web and new Outlook are “under investigation.”

Servers need tz database 2026e

Code outside Microsoft reads the IANA time zone database. Each province arrived in a separate release, the tz database’s NEWS file shows: BC in 2026b (April 22), Alberta in 2026c (July 8) and Manitoba in 2026e (September 29). All three are modeled as changing on November 1 at 02:00.

We tested this on November 3. With tzdata 2026a compiled by zic, noon UTC on December 1 showed as UTC-08:00 in Vancouver, UTC-07:00 in Edmonton and UTC-06:00 in Winnipeg, an hour off in each. Ubuntu 24.04’s tzdata 2026e, Python 3.11’s zoneinfo and Node 22.23.4 all gave UTC-07:00, -06:00 and -05:00. The abbreviations change too: Vancouver now reads MST, Edmonton CST, Winnipeg EST.

What to do now

  1. Patch Windows on every device in those provinces. “Devices on unsupported Windows versions will not receive the time zone update,” Microsoft says.
  2. Have organizers re-save meetings. Only the organizer can change a meeting’s zone. Changing a recurring series resets its exceptions, so note moved instances first and recreate them after. Outlook mobile cannot edit existing events yet.
  3. Run the Exchange cmdlet for one-off meetings once it ships, and keep recurring series on the manual route.
  4. Move flows to the stopgap zones and note each one. Microsoft says not to use the “Alberta/British Columbia/Manitoba Standard Time” IDs yet, so every flow you move now needs a second change once those work.
  5. Check tzdata on servers with dpkg -l tzdata or rpm -q tzdata; anything before 2026e gets at least Manitoba wrong.

The manual route costs time. One Reddit admin wrote about 900 lines of PowerShell to update Outlook settings and events, The Register reported; we have not seen the script. If something still looks wrong, Microsoft asks admins to open a support case with “#CanadaTimeZone” in the title.

Sources

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