Features e other press : How do you think that Canada and Mexico can develop the social understand- that would make a North American community along the lines of the European ion happen? Do you think that North America’s geography makes that idea impos- le? : I don’t think the geography is so much of a problem...these days, it’s interests that ing people together; I don’t think geography necessarily separates them. In areas re Canada and Mexico have common interests—in trying to deal with the United tes, for example—we'll try to work together. [NAFTA’s creation] was a good exam- of the understanding that between us we could probably have more influence [with le United States] than if we were dealt with separately. On the social understanding, I think we're still some time away. I think it depends t time frame you're looking at, in the sense that Mexico and Canada are such dif- nt societies, in the way they are organized, in terms of their past histories, in terms their current sociological and ethnic makeup. We're a huge country of immigrants in ada; we are very different country from the country that the two founding fathers troduced 200 hundred years ago. I don’t think Mexico is all that different from what Spaniards found...there has been evolution; of course there has been. But in many ys, we are a country that is evolving very quickly, and I’m not entirely convinced that exico is at the same pace of evolution. It’s coming along, and certainly there’s no ques- n that under President Fox they are making extraordinary advances...but they’re still ite a distance from where we are. I think, eventually, there will be more points of common interest, but right now, in ¢ medium term, we are both so preoccupied by the US approach to the respective rders. The problems are very different on the two borders, and we're kind of locked to trying to fix those problems on the border. I think Mexico is evolving now, much quicker than it did before, and now on some titutional issues, we will start to see some overlap, but I don’t know whether it will right now. : Jean Chrétien has traditionally embraced a “calculated ambivalence” towards the ited States, according to political scientist Andrew Cooper among others, where he s tried to appear neither too close nor too distant from the United States. If you pt this interpretation, do you see that approached changed after 9/11? : I think the PM is reflecting a common concern, which I don’t think has changed ce September 11. The Goldilocks thing: the porridge is too hot, the porridge is too Id, the porridge is just right, and we're always looking for just the right balance with United States: are we too close, are we too distant, or are we just maintaining a very en Bellamy atures Editor rst there was time. What followed was a realization that time could be changed. Ever ce then, like it or not, there has been daylight-savings time. Time in the ancient world was measured by the position of celestial bodies. Some of e earliest time-keeping instruments have been dated back 20,000 years and were ade from simple holes and lines that have been scratched into bones. Each hole indi- tes one day, and the scratches match different phases of the moon. 6,000 years ago in t, early stargazers realized that the star Sirius rose up next to the sun every 365 ys, about when the annual flooding of the Nile occurred. About 1,000 years later in at is known today as Iraq, the Sumerians were using a calendar that was divided into months of 30 days. Each day was divided up into 12 periods. Each period was two urs in duration. Each two-hour period was then further divided into 30 parts of four inutes each. The Sumerian system for keeping time was based on the cycles of the oon, much like the prehistoric bone records rather than the Egyptian calendar. Later, ter the Babylonians had replaced the Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates region, the erian calendar was replaced by a lunar calendar that was comprised of 12, alter- ting 29 and 30-day months making for a 354-day year. The great circles of standing nes, such as Stonehenge, that are spread across Great Britain and Ireland, are each sitioned in such a way as to measure the passing of the seasons. In Central and South erica, the Mayan culture developed a great cyclical calendar, which spans 5,125 ars beginning in 3114 BCE (Before Common Era) and ending in 2012 CE, barely e years in our future. The Mayan’s had multiple calendars, which are all interrelat- : the Tzolkin, the Haab, and the Long Count, which combined made up what was led the Great Cycle. The Mayan calendar is perhaps the most accurate of all the cient calendars, which measured the solar year to 365.2422 days. The Julian calen- , introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, had calculated the solar year to 365.25 October 23, 2002 friendly, but sort of business-like relationship with the United States? I think the PM has found that balance quite effectively, perhaps—to some extent—in contrast with the previous PM, whom some found to be a little too close to the United States. I think Canadians have a tremendous respect and admiration for the United States, they’re probably America’s most solid defenders when the chips are down. But having said that, there’s also a little bit of scratchiness, because we're all concerned about being mistaken for Americans, or being seen as too close to the Americans, or being concerned about Americans taking over Canadians’ way of life. So you have the other side of the rela- tionship, which is a bit of defensiveness by Canadians, where you're trying to maintain our own space, which the Americans find quite curious, because they say, “of course you have your own space...”I think the PM has found that balance, and I don’t think in many ways that has changed since September 11. In fact, I think that what we've done on the border in many ways demonstrates the maturity of our relationship in that both sides had to make some concessions and compromises on how we manage the border. and we had to do that because there was a common problem that we had to solve. Giving up things for a greater good, and I think we've done that quite nicely. aylight-Savings: A Walk Through Time days. The Julian calendar, being inaccurate, caused problems with time over the years, and although it added an extra day every four years, by the 16th century the Easter Holiday was moving towards summer. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decided to skip ten days in order to resynchronize the day count with respect to the equinoxes. What hap- pened in that year was October 4, 1582 was followed by October 15, and yet the role of days was not interrupted. It also resulted in the Western world’s use of the Gregorian calendar, which is still in use today. It is also interesting to note that Russia was the last country in the West to reform to the Gregorian calendar. This change occurred after the Bolshevik revolution resulting in January 31, 1918 becoming February 14, 1919. It must have been like an early version of the “millennium bug.” Evolution of the dock Early clocks seem to have appeared about the same time as the rise of social organi- zations, bureaucracies, and formal religions. The Egyptians began using obelisks between five and six thousand years ago. An obelisk is a tall, tapering, four-sided mon- ument that casts a shadow across a large circular area, much like an over-sized sundial. It allowed the Egyptians to partition the day into morning and afternoon. An obelisk also showed the longest and shortest days of the year. As the obelisk calendars devel- oped, additional markers were added around the base of the monument indicating fur- ther subdivisions of time. Water clocks were one of the first mechanical instruments to measure time. One of the oldest water clocks was found in the tomb of Amenhotepl, pharaoh of Egypt around 1,500 BCE. The earliest water clocks were large bowls carved into stone. At the bottom of the bowl a tiny hole was drilled, allowing water to escape from the bow] at a constant rate. Markers were etched into the sides of the bowl, indicating different hours. The Ancient Greeks borrowed this technology from the Egyptians, beginning to page 17 ©