Canada isn't willing to let U.S. 'dictate' trade agreements: Janice Charette - CBC

Being part of the Canadian family feels good, writes Janice Kennedy, until you start hearing the raised voices and slamming doors from inside our house. With all the raised voices and slamming doors, our family seems pretty troubled these days, doesn’t it? It’s tough to be an impassioned Canadian in this best-of-times/worst-of-times moment. On the one hand, Canadian pride has never been fiercer. Collectively, there’s an energizing determination to fight the trade war every way possible, from buying Canadian (or at least not American) to vacationing here or anyplace except you-know-where. Across the country, the maple leaf is ubiquitous.

A day on Earth is no longer linked to the rising and setting of the sun after the world's timekeepers voted to get rid of the leap second. Since the 1970s, leap seconds have been added to global clocks 27 times, to keep atomic time in sync with Earth's daily rotation, which has slowed over billions of years. On such occasions clocks would pause for a second at 11:59:59 on New Year's Eve to allow the Earth's rotation to catch up with atomic time – which is set by the steady tick of electrons rather than planetary movement. The last one happened in 2016. But on Thursday afternoon, the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris approved a resolution to allow the difference between civil time (what people set their clocks to) and solar time to increase from one second to one hour. It means that there will be no more adjustments to clocks until the difference between a solar day and a 24-hour Earth atomic day has slipped by 60 minutes – a few thousand years from now.