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These days, buying gasoline in litres is perfectly normal; anyone under 50 would not remember any other practice. But when the metric system was introduced in Canada in the 1970s, there was quite a stir in some quarters.

On Jan. 3, 1979, we reported on a visit to one gas station — Sunoco at Papineau Ave. and Rosemont Blvd. — that was among the first to sell gas in litres, well ahead of the compliance deadline the following year.

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Daniel Charlebois, photographed by Len Sidaway, was taking the change in stride. The new system didn’t really make a big difference, he said, because he normally either filled his tank, or put in a set dollar amount.

While younger people — Charlebois was in his 20s — seemed to be having an easier time of it, Roméo Giroux, 72, also took a practical approach: “The conversion makes no difference how far I go on a tank of gas,” he said, quoted in the same story. Gas was selling for 20.2 cents per litre, by the way.

Their views reflected the fact that metrication, gradually implemented throughout the 1970s, was less controversial in Quebec than in some other parts of Canada, where the outgoing British Imperial system was seen as part of the country’s British heritage. The government of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had decided on the switch to metric because of its simplicity and because much of the world was already using that system; at the time, the United States, too, had been expected to make the switch. That still hasn’t happened.