Ng's comment implying that the update includes or is prompted by Alberta's more recent actions was an incorrect (but well-intentioned) assumption or simplification, given it took ~5 weeks for Apple to propagate BC's changes.

The Alberta changes haven’t been released yet (with good reason), which is the main reason it hasn’t been included in an Apple release.

Apple’s OTA time zone updates also contain updated information for ICU, not just the zoneinfo data. The ICU team took some time to decide how to handle an issue raised by the BC change; Apple’s release had to wait for that discussion to conclude. It also took a few days to adjust to a change ICU made in the build process as a result of that discussion. Typically we try to turn releases around in less time than 2026b took.

Debbie

On May 31, 2026, at 1:51 AM, Tim Parenti via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:


On Sun, 31 May 2026 at 04:16, Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
Gary Ng reported[1] that on Tuesday he got a notification on his Apple
TV that updated time zone information was available, and that this was
because Apple pushed out an over-the-air time zone update for Canadian
users due to recent provincial legislation in BC and Alberta.

I'm skeptical at least about the "Alberta" part, since the Alberta
changes are not yet official. Does anyone have definitive information
about this?

I just checked my machine running macOS 26.5 Tahoe, which seems to have received tz 2026b as an update early Wednesday, though I have not yet done the "manual restart" to apply it.  As such, I can compare them directly and confirm that, for Canada, this only contains the BC changes we've published:

/private/var/db/timezone/tz % diff -r {2025c.1.0,2026b.1.0}/zoneinfo/America
Binary files 2025c.1.0/zoneinfo/America/Vancouver and 2026b.1.0/zoneinfo/America/Vancouver differ

Ng's comment implying that the update includes or is prompted by Alberta's more recent actions was an incorrect (but well-intentioned) assumption or simplification, given it took ~5 weeks for Apple to propagate BC's changes.

--
Tim Parenti