It stopped being cute, Canada. Get your metric act together.

During my childhood, Canada decided to go metric.  It seemed like a good idea.  After all, just about every country on the planet had embraced a system that actually made sense.  Metric, being a system that was actually designed rather than being based, for example, on the distance between some lucky guy's thumb and pinky or the length of some other guy's foot, had a simple logic to it.  As long as you could multiply or divide by ten, you could understand the underlying principle of the whole thing.  If you couldn't multiply or divide by ten, well you could just remember to move that decimal point.

1 metre = 100 centimetres
1.78 metres = 178 centimetres
1 kilometre = 1000 metres
400 metres = .4 kilometres

Canada adopted the metric system in 1970.  To be more accurate, Canada started to adopt the metric system in 1970.  The problem is that we haven't really finished.  Look at this absurd photo from Grouse Mountain in Vancouver.  It's comical in a lot of ways, but the most comical thing about it is that most Canadians don't notice anything odd about it.

After living overseas for a long time (where everything is metric, because, well...duh!), I often ended up explaining our odd relationship to metric by describing a typical Canadian giving directions: "The hockey rink, eh?  No problem.  Drive north 3 kilometres and make a right.  Then the rink will about about 400 feet down on the right side."

Sure, it's cute, but forty five years after we allegedly went metric, it's also kind of annoying.  And to be honest, I have no idea anymore how far 400 feet is anymore.  400 metres, sure, but 400 feet, what the hell is that?

Now that I am living in Canada again, I am happy to see that we have made some more progress to metric.  When I went to get my new driver's licence, I gave my height in centimetres, and the woman at ICBC didn't bat an eye.  My licence includes both my height and weight in metric units.  Still, though, tons of Canadians cling to the habit of describing their body size in units that 6.95 billion people wouldn't understand.  Fruit and vegetables are sold in 100 gram increments.  Even building codes seem to have changed to metric.  [I say 'seem to have changed' because, for some bizarre reason, all the jurisdictions I looked up won't actually let you look at their building codes online. Instead, you have to pay a lot of money to buy them.]

For temperature, I think Canadians only use Fahrenheit when they want to make it seem really hot. Being a nation of people obsessed with making weather sound extreme, I guess it's more impressive to say, "It was 90 degrees!" (instead of 32).  If you're from Europe or Asia and you come looking for an apartment or house, don't expect square metres.  For some reason, real estate persists in using square feet.  Similar to talking about how hot it is, maybe it's because things sound so much bigger.

But, as the Grouse Mountain ad shows, we still have a way to go.  Or  maybe it's just a cultural trait to be confused.