AskACanadian

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A place to ask Canadians questions and get answers. The most obvious questions would be about Canada, but you can ask about pretty much anything; news, current events, society, etc

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Will you switch to the Metric System? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/askacanadian

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Hello from Europa 🇪🇺💪🏻🇨🇦 :)

Afaik you are using both Imperial (inbe4 us-americans think its the american Imperium x_x) and Metric?

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[–] tunetardis 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh, we've been metric for most of my life, though I vaguely remember when the big push happened in Canada. It was in the late 70s and iirc was supposed to be a coordinated North America-wide transition, but then the US backed out. Canada largely followed through.

I remember getting fresh new textbooks at school with metric everywhere and all the road signs switching to kph. The weather forecasts switched to Celsius. There was a period there when I related to temperatures around freezing better in C and indoor temperatures in F because our thermostat still read F.

Some units involving cooking measures, building materials, and paper sizes remain non-metric in Canada. This is likely because we still need things to be interoperable with the US. One funny thing I remember though is that even before our switch from gallons to litres, we still had to do a conversion because we used imperial gallons that were slightly larger than the US ones!

[–] ragepaw 3 points 2 days ago

I'm old enough that I was taught both. But imperial units are still largely meaningless to me.