There’s a section in a book about First World War that’s been called the most Canadian paragraph ever written. It’s in the book At the Sharp End by historian Tim Cook, and he’s describing the way Canadian soldiers built trenches. Writes Cook, “the front-line trenches were ideally some six feet deep, and surmounted by another half to full meter of parapet”. If you’re Canadian, you probably didn’t notice anything off about that. But what Cook did was to casually mix two measurement systems in a single paragraph: He starts off by measuring the trench in feet, and then switches to meters for no particular reason. And Canadians do this all the time. Most of the world uses the metric system. The Americans use imperial. And then Canada uses an unholy amalgam of both. It’s one of our weirdest national traits – and one of the first things that immigrants notice when they come here.
We measure weather and room temperature in Celsius, but we still bake in Fahrenheit. Your weight is in pounds, but your car’s weight is in kilograms. You drink alcohol by the ounce, but soda by the millilitre. The phenomenon was summed up in an imaginary dialogue by Canadian comedian Janel Comeau. Scene: An American, a European and a Canadian. The American says “I use miles and pounds”. The European says “I use kilometres and kilograms”. The Canadian takes an assortment of global measuring systems, crushes them into a powder, and snorts them like cocaine before declaring, “I’m 5’3, I weigh 150lbs, horses weigh 1000kgs, I need a cup of flour and 1L of milk”.
And none of this is an accident. Canada’s bizarre system of half-imperial, half-metric represents the truce lines of a culture war battle whose scale and ferocity is all but forgotten today. There were people in the 1970s who wanted to purge this country of any memory of the imperial system. Feet, inches and gallons were a relic of a backwards, colonial age, and the future belonged to rationalist, scientific metrication. A small army of bureaucrats armed with meter sticks and one-litre jugs were dispatched to spread the metrication gospel. And if you didn’t comply with the new metric zeitgeist, you could face severe consequences. For example, if you were a gas station continuing to sell gas by the gallon instead of by the litre, you could be fined.
But this grand plan to reprogram the Canadian psyche was thwarted, and thwarted forever. And when you buy beef by the pound or do your carpentry with inches and feet, you are the unwitting legacy of a populist, anti-government protest movement that hated the metric system and went all-out to stop it. We’re talking protests. Lawsuits. Civil disobedience. This story will literally feature a group of pissed-off Conservative MPs opening a “freedom” gas station to defy federal mandates to sell gasoline by the litre.
Tristin Hopper The metric schism | Canada Did What?”, National Post, 2025-03-11.
July 1, 2025
QotD: Canadian measuring “systems”
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