[F Eh Q is a feature where we answer your questions about Canadian topics. In this installment: THE METRIC SYSTEM!]


Dear Plaidspin,

I love visiting Canada, but I'm always confused by what measurements to use when I'm there. The street signs are in metric, but heights and weights are still in imperial units, yet the temperature's in Celsius, but food's served by the gram and millilitre, except sometimes when it's by the ounce or pound...


How do you guys keep track of this stuff?

Sincerely,

Muddled Measurements in Montana



Dear Muddled Measurements in Montana,

People have questioned whether these letters we get here at the Plaidspin Mail Bureau are fake. Well, that's a good question.


Now, let's jump into that letter of yours, Muddled Measurements in Montana!

A wise man once said that "the metric system is the tool of the devil - my car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it." Well, that sentiment was shared by an overwhelming number of Canadians in the 1970s, when the metric system was first introduced by a hippie Prime Minister to a suspicious public, only for the government Metric Commission to be killed off by a diehard Conservative government, leaving us with a half-converted country that can flip-flop between metric and imperial measurements four times in the same sentence.


Alright - I think we need to rewind a bit.

It's true that Canada is, officially, a metric nation. It's also true that in everyday conversation, especially among older Canadians, you're more likely to hear American/imperial measurements.


On the one hand, metric (no, not that one) is the incredibly easy-to-use system of measurement based on a simple decimal system where distance, weight and volume are all universally convertible with one another. (For example, a litre is the amount of volume contained in a cube with 10 centimetre sides, while a kilogram is the weight of one litre of water. One calorie is the amount of energy required to heat 1 milligram of water by 1 degree celsius. Celsius is measured from 0° freezing to 100° boiling.)

The imperial system, meanwhile, is a system used in three countries on Earth (two of which are Liberia and Burma) based on the length of some dead European's foot.


The third country left on the planet still using imperial units, though, just happens to have a trade relationship with Canada worth $782-billion per year, the largest trade relationship between two countries on Earth. This tends to confuse matters a bit.

Before we go back to the 70s to explore the struggle to convert Canada to metric, let's take inventory of how we stand right now in the year 2015 - when Canadians use metric, and when we use imperial. I've made you a handy reference chart!


(Please don't post a comment fact-checking my jokes.)

How We Got This Way:

Up until the 1960s, Canadians used British imperial units. Miles, gallons, inches, Fahrenheit, pounds - owing to Canada's close relationships with Britain and the US, everything was in lockstep. (A few things were still different - for example, a British imperial pint was 20 imperial ounces, while a US imperial pint was 16 US ounces - but we'll leave those minor distinctions to the trivia wonks, and to the 1960s drunks convinced their beer wasn't big enough.)


By the late 60s and early 70s, though, tides were changing around the world. Full-scale adoption of the metric system, which had already been the norm in most of western Europe and South America for the past century, was gaining traction among the last imperial holdouts of the anglosphere: the US, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and Canada. In Canada, the imperial system had deep roots. Gas stations listed their prices by the gallon, grocers sold their meats by the pound, radio stations reported that day's temperature in Fahrenheit. Metrication would be a massive ordeal for a massively-spread out country, and many older Canadians simply felt it wasn't worth the effort. Pierre Trudeau thought it was.

For our American readers, I feel a broad overview of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who was in office from 1968-1979, and again for a second term from 1980-1984, is warranted. Forgive the bit of a tangent, but what else is this column for if not Canadian history lessons?


Pierre Trudeau was a bold, liberal, smart-assed, iconoclastic hippie with bushy sideburns who hung out with Fidel Castro and John Lennon. After a century of boring, frowning Prime Ministers with dull grey suits and traditionalist principles, Trudeau, and his Liberal Party, were a breath of fresh air for the baby-boomer generation. He wore flamboyant suits with a rose pinned to his lapel, he did pirouettes in front of photographers, and he told the opposition to fuck off in the House of Commons.


Trudeau's rallies were attended by thousands of screaming Woodstock-era young Canadians (dubbed Trudeaumania), he took strong liberal stances, stood up to Quebec terrorists, and championed gay rights long before that was a mainstream opinion. (His famous quote that endures in Canadian political history, "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation", was as pertinent when he said it in 1967 as it is today.)

When it was revealed in 1971 that in Richard Nixon's White House tapes he referred to Trudeau as "an asshole", Trudeau famously responded "I've been called worse things by better people."


It should be noted that, for as much as Trudeau is revered today, there's also a segment of Canadian conservatives who revile him. In 2004, a CBC-sponsored contest voted Trudeau the third greatest Canadian to have ever lived. Meanwhile, a few years later, respondents for another online magazine's poll voted him the worst Canadian ever. (He edged notorious serial killer Paul Bernardo by a few votes.) Trudeau's base was mostly in major cities and with young Canadians, while in rural areas among older Canadians, he was often mostly seen as a hippie at best, or at worst, a... [whispers] socialist.

So in 1970, when Trudeau's Liberal Party government first introduced a new government agency called the Metric Commission (also known as the Preparatory Commission for the Conversion to the Metric System) to wean Canadians off of imperial, you could see how some were ready to embrace a new era, while others were irked about this hippie stealing their inches and gallons.

The Metric Commission had to work slowly - they realized that the work to convert Canadians to a whole new system of measurements would be a game of inches (er, centimetres.) In 1971, the Metric Commission officially came into power. The system would be introduced in waves: by 1975, Celsius temperatures would be introduced. By 1976, all prepackaged foods had to have their labeling converted to metric. And by 1977, all road signs would be converted from miles to kilometres. It was a lot to digest, and for a lot of Canadians who were stuck in their ways, a stubborn opposition was growing.


The Metric Commission's job was to introduce the metric system in a gentle, friendly way, hoping that Canadians would eventually warm up to the new system. Metric conversions were put on labels with the "maple leaf within an M" logo seen in the video above - when you bought a gallon of milk, a Metric Commission logo would helpfully remind you that you were really buying 3.78 litres.

Here's a representative TV spot from 1975 produced by the National Film Board of Canada, showing what different levels of snowfall feel like in centimetres. Notice that the cartoon-based approach of the Metric Commission is largely aimed at young people, who would be the ones mostly likely to be taught the new metric system in schools - it doesn't focus too much on the math of actually converting inches to centimetres.

Metric was catching on across Canada, albeit reluctantly in some areas. Trudeau's government wanted to make sure that Canada was embracing the future, as it seemed that the whole world - even the holdout Americans - would eventually go metric. The opposition Conservative Party, meanwhile, pilloried Trudeau over the Metric Commission - the idea that this hippie-dippie Prime Minister was trying to cram socialist math down Canadians' throat was, in their minds, the ultimate insult to a generation of Canadians raised on good ol' miles and gallons.


In 1983, in the late stages of metrication, when Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament Bill Domm challenged Trudeau to justify the Metric Commission on the floor or Parliament, Trudeau said "... I do know that the dinosaurs are those who refuse to see that the metric system is worldwide in its scope, and that Canada has to live in the world and wants to trade with the world."

The aforementioned Bill Domm, for his part, made a career out of vocally opposing the Metric Commission. As a Member of Parliament from Peterborough, ON, he took part in a stunt where he and other Progressive Conservative members pumped gas at an illegal "Freedom To Measure" gas station, where gas could be sold either by the litre or by the gallon. (Peterborough had been one of the country's three initial testing grounds for the metric system in the early 70s, and by the early 80s had become a hotbed of anti-metric opposition.)


By the early 80s, it had come to the point where Canadian civil servants were getting fired for their opposition to metric. As much as Trudeau had wanted the Metric Commission to be a simple "get in touch with the 20th century" initiative, it had become intensely politicized. And for a lot of conservative politicians, the promise of a return to familiar gallons of gas, miles per hour, and Fahrenheit temperatures was a handy bit of red meat to throw their supporters.

Up until 1980, the US was presumed to be on a roadmap to metrication. The United States Metric Board, introduced by Gerald Ford in 1975 and later championed by Jimmy Carter, was set to be Americans' answer to the Canadian Metric Commission. There was even a metric cartoon, produced by the same people who made ABC's Schoolhouse Rock.


We were all set for a brave new standardized metric world!

Instead, in an election that will probably change the way the world measures things for the next century, Americans went with Ronald Reagan in 1980. And Reagan wanted fuck-all to do with the metric system.


The Grinch Who Stole Metric

Reagan's decision to defund the United States Metric Board within a year of entering office had ripples that were felt across Canada. If Canada's largest trading partner was sticking with imperial, would Canada be left behind? This panic is best represented in this CBC News spot from 1982. (Out of all these links, this clip probably does the best job of explaining the original question of why Canada never fully committed to the metric system.)


CBC Archives CBC Digital Archives has an extensive amount of content from Radio and Television, covering a wide… Read more

By 1984, Trudeau had resigned. A new Progressive Conservative government, led by Brian Mulroney, a diehard admirer of Reagan and Thatcher, would eventually be swept into power. In fact, his PC Party won the greatest majority of seats in Canadian federal election history. Mulroney was Prime Minister from 1984 until 1993, and consistently squashed any ideas of bringing back the Metric Commission he'd defunded. Mulroney was playing smart politics - he knew that his base was with older voters and rural Canadians, where metric had never fully taken off.


And so, here we are today. You want to know the answer to why Canadians only measure in metric half the time? It's because the government metrication program got defunded halfway through its existence thanks to a political squabble. At the time of the defunding, Canada had embraced kilometres per hour, Celsius temperatures, and other waves of changes - but hadn't yet embraced the most entrenched imperial measurements, like personal height and weight. Blame Brian Mulroney. Or really, blame Ronald Reagan.

The half-converted nature of our country has been causing problems ever since. If you're into aviation, you may have learned about the famed Gimli Glider - the Air Canada Boeing 767 that ran out of fuel halfway between its flight from Montreal to Edmonton in 1983, only to miraculously glide into a landing at an air force base in Gimli, Manitoba with no fuel left in the tank. Only a few injuries were sustained, with no fatalities.


So, what was the problem with the plane? Quoting sections from the Wikipedia article:

At the time of the incident, Canada was converting to the metric system. As part of this process, the new 767s being acquired by Air Canada were the first to be calibrated for metric units (litres and kilograms) instead of customary units (gallons and pounds). [...] For the trip to Edmonton, the pilot calculated a fuel requirement of 22,300 kilograms (49,200 lb). A dripstick check indicated that there were 7,682 litres (1,690 imp gal; 2,029 US gal) already in the tanks. To calculate how much more fuel had to be added, the crew needed to convert the quantity in the tanks to a mass, subtract that figure from 22,300 kg and convert the result back into a volume [...] Between the ground crew and pilots, they arrived at an incorrect conversion factor of 1.77, which was the weight of a litre of fuel in pounds. This was the conversion factor provided on the refueller's paperwork and which had always been used for the airline's imperial-calibrated fleet [...] Instead of 22,300 kg of fuel, they had 22,300 pounds on board — 10,100 kg, about half the amount required to reach their destination.


That, in a nutshell, should tell you why Canadians were originally reluctant to convert. If even flight engineers couldn't convert between imperial and metric units, it was assumed that the rest of us were doomed.

And so, instead of forcing full metrication down our throats, we adopted a bit of a motley hybrid approach to measurements from the 80s going forward. Today, Canadians have a unique knack for comfortably switching between metric and imperial in the same sentence. If anything, it provides us with a handy way of spotting other Canadians.


[If you have kilograms and kilograms worth of question about Canada, you can ask F Eh Q!]

