this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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AskACanadian
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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!
I assume you mean just in everyday use, because Canada has been officially metric since 1971. We might discuss weight or height in imperial measurements, but if someone says they're 175cm I think most people will understand and not ask for a conversion.
Weβre kind of stuck between 2 systems still. Most people weigh in pounds, we cook in Celsius, our lumber is 2x4 for building materials.
Weβre kind of like England where theyβre metric, but their roads are in miles and their gas is in gallons and their weight is measured in stones or hogs heads, or bags of bad teeth or whatever.
Americans at least have 1, 2, and 3 liter soda bottles! Booze is 750ml bottles!
I guess that's all we really care about. ;)
What size is a Canadian glass of beer? A British pint (568ml) or even fraction thereof, the same but with an American pint (about 470ml), or an even number of decilitres as in continental Europe?
Most stuff is metric already. Some people still use imperial for pop culture things that are mostly influenced by the US. Construction materials are imperial because we are the major lumber supplier for the US and everything is cut imperial. If that were to change, maybe the construction industry would start to change too. Buy our lumber!
The US does not use "Imperial". They use "United States Customary Units". The two systems forked when the US left the British empire, and evolved independently.
We use the metric system for distance, volume, and temperature already. I'm sure those who don't immediately adjust for human height/weight can use an app while they're getting used to metric for those as well.