Canada's Official Time: at the Right Time and Place

Abstract

Thanks to an ensemble of atomic clocks maintained by scientists at the NRC time standards laboratory in Ottawa, Canada's official time has an accuracy of one second every 3 million years. As Canada's timekeeper, NRC disseminates this precise time through short-wave radio broadcasts, a telephone talking clock, a web clock, network time protocol (NTP) and through CBC and Radio Canada broadcasts. CBC surveys show that there are over 430,000 listeners per day for the time signal. Annually there are 500,000 calls for the talking clock service, 40,000 calls for the computer code, 300,000 hits for the web clock, and 11 billion requests for time on the NTP service. Clearly, official time is important to Canadians.