Invalid date when setting one computer's clock from another

I have the following code in a Bash script, which takes the current date/time and sets it via SSH on a target computer:

ssh @ "date --set '$(date)'"

This was working fine with various Ubuntu distros, but recently the target changed to another flavour of Linux and I get "invalid date" error. What is the correct way to do this, which should work for any version of Linux?