Get ready for a wild story featuring angry farmers, lawbreaking butchers, constitutional lawsuits, a ‘freedom’ gallons-only gas station — and the unquenchable Canadian spirit of patriotic pragmatism
Canadians measure weather in Celsius but cook using Fahrenheit. We drink alcohol by the ounce and soda by the litre. Why? This unholy amalgam of metric and imperial is the hard-won truce of a chaotic war between a technocracy-obsessed bureaucracy and a liberty-loving people who refused to submit to measurement tyranny. Get ready for a wild story featuring angry farmers, lawbreaking butchers, constitutional lawsuits, a “freedom” gallons-only gas station — and the unquenchable Canadian spirit of patriotic pragmatism. Listen to the second episode of Canada Did What?!, subscribe for future episodes and read the transcript below.
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Canada Did What?! is a Postmedia podcast that digs into the untold, surprising political stories of the last few decades with host Tristin Hopper. From the metric wars to Morgentaler, from the October Crisis to the abortion debate, we’re unpacking all the wildest political moments you might think you remember — and giving you the real story you never knew. We talk to the politicians, journalists and newsmakers who were right there when history happened. And we have a lot of fun doing it.
From March 4 until April 1, National Post will release one episode every Tuesday. Each episode tackles a misunderstood moment in recent Canadian history.
For the next episode, sit back and listen to the heartbreaking tale of what it’s like to achieve the absolute pinnacle of political success … only to have it all stripped away, bit by excruciating bit. You can listen to all five episodes, as they come out, on all the major podcast platforms.
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Canada Did What?! Episode 2 transcript
Tristin Hopper: 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.
Welcome to Canada Did What?!, the show where we take the big Canadian politics you think you remember and tell you the real stories you never knew. And you probably thought an episode about metric conversion would be boring. Well you’re wrong. Wrong by fathoms.
But before we get into the political intrigue surrounding metrication, let’s start with the time that metric conversion almost killed 70 people. Imagine yourself inside a Boeing 767 operated by Air Canada. It’s July 1983, you’re travelling between Montreal and Edmonton, and a couple hours into the flight the comforting roar of its two jet engines suddenly stop and most of the power cuts out.
Clip: Good evening, it was a metric mix-up. Air Canada has confirmed the plane that landed at Gimley, Manitoba last Saturday, ran out of gas because of an error in metric conversion.
Hopper: I regret to inform you that you’re inside the Gimli Glider; one of history’s only incidents of a civilian airliner running out of gas in the middle of the sky. And this happened because someone didn’t know how to properly measure out enough jet fuel. Now I mention the Gimli Glider only to note that systems of measure are not just numbers on a page. They’re cultural objects. They might not be on par with language or religion, but their ways of understanding the world around us, and if you screw with them, even with the best of intentions, you might get the occasional airliner falling out of the sky. Fortunately, in this instance, it miraculously worked out fine.
The pilots in control of this particular Air Canada flight just happened to be two of the only people on Earth perfectly suited to safely bring down a crippled, full-sized airliner in the middle of Manitoba. One of them was an experienced glider pilot. The other one was a former Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who just happened to have served at a Manitoba air base that was now directly underneath them. Here’s our guest, the renowned Canadian YouTuber JJ McCullough. We picked him because he spends more time than almost anyone else thinking about obscure Canadian minutia. He also received nearly 1 million views on a 20 minute YouTube video about Metric Conversion, which should be impossible.
JJ McCullough: You know, I lived in Japan many years ago. And when you look at a Japanese apartment listing, they measure the size of the of the of the floor footage in terms of how many tatami mats can fit in. And it’s like you and I have no idea what a tatami mat is, but to a Japanese person, this is a very familiar object, and it makes perfect sense to think of an apartment in terms of how many tatami mats could fit into it. And so they would sort of say that, like switching to any other system is completely dopey, because, you know, how many tatami mats is that? That doesn’t make any sense, square foot, square meters. Instinctively, that means nothing, right? But it’s all just based on culture at the end of the day. It’s what you grow up with, it’s what you’re familiar with is what, sort of, seems correct to you.
Hopper: Metrication, naturally, is the fault of a Trudeau. In Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s first term, his government released the White Paper on Metric Conversion, the document that’s going to set all of this saga in motion. It’s just 22 pages, but the gist of it is that the entire developed world is switching to the metric system, and if Canada doesn’t follow them, it will be left to languish in a “inch-pound island in an otherwise metric world.” The document states that the tide of history is clear: Metric is the future. The only question is whether Canada will embrace this future with open arms, or be dragged into it kicking and screaming. The White Paper contains this dire warning: If Canada does not go metric, “full development of trade potential would become impossible.”
Fortunately, the report’s authors assure the Canadian public that they, as the government, have shouldered the burden of leading us into this metric future. You think I’m joking, but this is an actual quote from the paper: “The Government (capital G) accepts its responsibility to provide leadership in planning for the processes of change.”
McCullough: Most other countries of the world, you know, countries in Europe and their sort of Imperial colonies, you know, they basically all embrace the metric system not terribly long after the system itself was invented in the 19th century, right? Or sort of the late 18th century, and then sort of broadly adopted in the early 19th century. Because we held out for so long Imperial was able to, sort of like, fully flower in our culture in a way that became very difficult to, sort of like, unlearn later on, when you’re sort of thinking of, say, other other countries that are using sort of a hodgepodge mix of different sort of measurement systems, and then the perfect system, quote, unquote, comes along in sort of the early 19th century. You know, it’s very easy to sort of adopt that system, particularly if you have also a very sort of authoritarian government, if you’re run by some sort of authoritarian monarchy, as many of the countries in Europe were at the time. You know, it’s not difficult to sort of impose that system from on high at that sort of a pivotal moment, whereas there’s sort of an effort towards sort of modernization and all of this kind of thing. But, you know, in the Canadian context, that wasn’t what we had.
Hopper: Now, I like the metric system – but this is all a bit much. From our vantage point, in the early 21st century, metrication wasn’t that important. Case in point: The United States. In 1970, when this white paper came out, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product was the modern-day equivalent of about one trillion dollars. Now, it’s about 26 trillion dollars. And they did all of that without adopting the metric system. As soon as you cross the U.S.-Canadian border, it’s still miles per hour and gallons of gas.
What the Americans did was to adopt metric where it was useful, and not bother with it anywhere else. If you are an American export firm selling product to Europe, you’re going to deal in kilograms and hectolitres. That’s what the Ford Motor Company does; although a Ford truck sold in the United States has a speedometer ranged in miles per hour, the company voluntarily started designing those trucks in metric in the early 1970s. If you are an American engineer or research scientist, you’re going to do your calculations in metric because it’s easier – and is understandable to the rest of the world. And they’ve been doing that for quite some time; the moon landing was calculated in metric.
Clip:That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Hopper: In the United States, the moral of the last 50 years is that metric conversion can happen organically. If it makes sense to you, you’ll go metric. If it doesn’t, what’s the harm in continuing to measure your room temperature in Fahrenheit? In short, you didn’t really need to – say – form an entire federal department charged with compelling absolutely everyone everywhere to use the metric system for everything. Well, meet the Metric Commission. It doesn’t exist anymore. But at its height, the Metric Commission had a bustling Ottawa office with tendrils extending into every conceivable corner of Canadian civic, commercial and industrial life. If you had a job anywhere in 1970s Canada, at some point you had to answer to the Metric Commission.
Created by a 1971 order-in-council, the Commission’s marching orders were simple: Get Canadians on the metric system and only the metric system. There was even a metric oath! To be on the Metric Commission, you had to solemnly swear, “I will faithfully and honestly fulfil the duties that devolve upon me by reason of my appointment as a member of the Preparatory Commission for Metric Conversion.” The Metric Commission would end up being very explicit in their mission that it wasn’t sufficient for Canadians to use metric at work or at school. They wanted Canadians to forget that inches and pounds had ever existed, and resist the “temptation” of using them. This is from a 1974 CBC interview with Metric Commission chairman S. M. Gossage.
Clip: It’s going to be a tremendous temptation always to think in the customary terms of inches and pounds, yards and so forth, and then to convert, to convert from the metric to the yards to understand it. That’s inefficient. And you have to try to train yourself not to do it.
McCollough: The most compelling pitch for the metric system, you know, going back even into centuries past, was never that it was more rational. It was just that it was a single, unified system that, you know, all of the other countries were using, and that therefore, if we were to engage in international trade and stuff, it made sense to sort of follow a shared system. And I think that that logic made a great deal of sense in Europe, which is again, like where the system was initially invented and adopted, because you have all these different little European countries, and it wouldn’t make sense if you know the Dutch are using a different system than the Germans were using a different system than the French and the Spanish and the Portuguese. There was, like, a very strong utilitarian case to be made for sort of a unified system of weights and measures.
Hopper: As an aside, this is the exact same period when Canada was inaugurating a system of official bilingualism. The Official Languages Act, introduced in 1969, is the reason why your cereal box is in both French and English.
So if Canadians can live comfortably in a world of alternating French and English, surely they could also live in one that mixes metric and imperial? No. According to the federal government, imperial had to die.
McCollough: I think that’s a very good analogy to compare it to a sort of invented language like Esperanto, which people say has the most, like, rational grammar in the world, versus English, which is, you know, a messy and sort of strange language with lots of irrational rules and sort of absorbs all sorts of random bits and pieces from other languages. You know, English has sort of conquered the world as the as the lingua franca, if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms, but it has conquered the world, not because it is the most rational language in the world, but because it’s the most widely used language in the world. That is ultimately the more rational argument, right? It’s like, yeah, it’s an appeal. It’s the rationality of utilitarianism versus the rationality of sort of scientism. If we want to put it that way.
Hopper: Either way, metrication was a bureaucrat’s dream. The Metric Commission oversaw 11 steering committees, each charged with metricating a different sector of Canadian life: There’s one for textiles, another for education, another for “health and amusement services,” oddly. And these committees oversaw another 60 sector committees. And below that, there are innumerable “subcommittees,” “working groups” and “subcommittees of the working group subcommittees.” There were so many committees, in fact, that a 1975 report on the Canadian metrication process began by apologizing that it had to use the word “committee” so much.
It’s from this report that you can get an idea of the absolute thicket of bureaucracy that was involved in Canadian metric conversion. Buckle up, here: It’s the mid-1970s and you have been assigned to a five-member subcommittee tasked with figuring out metric standards for a specific category of semi-finished wood products. Let’s say wood chips – and there’s other subcommittees working on things like log size or wood stacking standards. You draft your metric standards on wood chips, and submit them to the Canadian Standards Association Committee on Scaling in Metric Units of Primary Forest Products — that was a real group. That committee reports to working group 8.1.3, the “roundwood and chip scaling” working group, who in turn reports to the “forestry” sector committee, which answers to the “forest products” steering committee, who answers to the Metric Commission.
At the beginning, seemingly everybody in Canada had caught metric fever. Almost immediately after the Liberal Party announced Canada’s new metric future in early 1970, the Conservative opposition immediately said they loved the idea —although this would change. Canada Backs Metric System was the wire service headline that went out across the country on January 17, 1970. But it was only when Canadians got a sense of what metrication would actually look like that they started to get angry. One of the first things you noticed was that weather forecasts were now in Celsius. On April 1, 1975, Environment Canada ceased providing temperature information in Fahrenheit. Then the speed limit signs all changed.
Technically, metric conversion meant that you could drive faster. The most common metric alteration to road signs was to turn 30 mile per hour zones into 50 km per hour zones. It’s not a perfect conversion; 50 km/h is equal to about 31 miles per hour — so you could drive one mile per hour faster. But that was little consolation for the driver suddenly faced with a landscape of signs that made no sense, and didn’t jibe with their car’s speedometer, which was in miles per hour.
Throughout the 1970s, Canadians were being barraged with mail, posters and newspaper advertisements telling you that metric was good for you — and could be fun!
This whole episode got me to thinking about all the other technical inefficiencies in our language and culture, many of which we don’t notice. You can obsess about how illogical the imperial system is, but then, why not the calendar? It’s stupid that February has 28 days, or that October, despite having the word Octo- in it is the tenth rather than the eight month.
Throughout the 1970s Canadians were being barraged with mail, posters and newspaper advertisements telling you that metric was good for you and could be fun. Here’s an August, 1977 ad from the Government of British Columbia warning people that the highway signs are all in metric now. For people having trouble with the conversion, it recommends “think (and talk) kilometre. Make it family fun while driving together.” And then, imperial measurements started becoming illegal.
Canada’s metric bureaucracy was subjecting the country to what they openly called a “cold turkey” strategy. Metric may not survive in an ecosystem in which it was allowed to coexist with other measurement systems. As such, imperial had to be banned. Starting January 1, 1981, by federal decree you would not be allowed to sell gasoline, food or furniture in imperial units. And this would continue until imperial bans had reached all other corners of the Canadian economy.
McCollough: I think that sort of the often militant tendency of the, like the sort of, the pro metrication sort of side, you know, was a reflection of the fact that, to some people, this was an ideological movement independent of just being a kind of practical reform. There were people that definitely saw metrication as a sort of signifier of being, you know, enlightened and on the side of science and on the side of rationality, you know, and people that were clinging to imperial as being, well, even I just sort of suggested clinging to imperial like, sort of implying that it was a sort of fundamentally, sort of backwards, you know, sort of sentimental, sort of cheap, you know, emotional disposition.
And to be fair, like that was how it played out in a sort of partisan way. Like this was a very divisive sort of political issue. And, you know, like the political rights, sort of the conservative side of the spectrum, sort of leaned into this as well and made metrication into a kind of culture war-ish sort of thing, where it’s like these pointy headed elites are trying to ram through this, like ideologically-driven sort of system that is sort of like seeking to, like, extinguish all distinction, or all distinctiveness, from our local culture. In favour of this kind of like bland globalism, so you can sort of see parallels to some of the culture war debates we have today. Right?
Hopper: Not for the first time, it was farmers who first got the idea to tell all of this to go straight to hell. Specifically, new measures that required grain farmers to sell their product only in metric units, instead of the bushels and pounds they’d been using for generations. March 26, 1977. Canadian Press headline: “Farmers oppose metric system.” Placeline: Ottawa. “MPs say Prairie grain farmers are nearly unanimous in their opposition to the government’s plan to use metric measurements in the grain industry.” And that was just the beginning.
As the metric crackdown got going in the early 1980s, Canada started seeing legions of ordinary people becoming folk heroes overnight, because they stood up against the tyranny of Big Metric. One of them was Calgary carpet store owner Zoritsa Kasparian. An immigrant to Canada from Communist Yugoslavia, she knew how the metric system worked; metric was the mandatory system of weights and measures across the entire Communist world. But she wanted to sell her carpets by the yard and by the metre, which was not allowed.
After the federal Consumer and Corporate Affairs Department hit Kasparian with a $1000 fine, she refused to pay it and dared the feds to put her in jail for it. This wasn’t about a measuring system, she told the Calgary Herald in 1982, it was about a bureaucracy that had gotten too comfortable “flexing its muscles” in her words. This last and most contentious phase of metrication was enforced by an agency derisively called the Metric Police. Officially known as the legal metrology division of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, they may not have been the jackbooted thugs their opponents made them out to be.
In a weird 1982 interview, Metric Police head Richard Knapp said he wished Canadians would just stop resisting metric. “I just wish it would go away … I just wish it wasn’t there,” he said of the resistance. But Knapp’s agents and their affiliates had immense power to enforce metrication. Here’s a 1981 report out of Peterborough, Ont. Dale’s Meat Market had metric scales on order, but was continuing to sell meat in imperial until they showed up. That wasn’t good enough for inspectors acting to enforce the federal Weights and Measures Act: They taped up the imperial scales so they couldn’t be used. As a local news account wrote, “customers had to be satisfied with guessed weights of their purchases in the meantime.”
A Kingston man, Mac Tackaberry, also said he would go to jail rather than submit to the Metric Commission. He ran a sheet metal business and openly said that metric was a superior system. But his customers preferred dealing in pounds, and it was in pounds that he was going to continue serving them – even if it meant federal agents showing up and putting all his 30 employees out of work. Said Tackaberry: “I don’t know why I can’t sell by the hat-full of snow if I want.”
‘Teens should be eliminated from our numerical systems, you got (counting) one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. For some reason, between 10 and 20 is just a mess, and then it gets more consistent: 20, 21, 22. You get rid of teens, 12 and 11, and you get, and it’s just tenty-one, tenty-two, tenty-three, tenty-four. Should we get rid of ‘teens?
McCollough: Again, I just think that, you know, even though these things are rational and you make a persuasive point, words are just too deeply integrated into our cultural traditions, right? I don’t want to go by my Slurpee at Seven Tenty-One.
Hopper: Another Kingston man Neil Fraser was suspended from his job at Revenue Canada because he objected to federal mandates banning imperial from grocery stores. Specifically, he had showed up to a protest carrying a sign reading: “Your freedom to measure is a measure of your freedom.” This briefly made Fraser the poster child of the anti-metric movement, although his qualms with the government turned out to be much more profound than metrication. Revenue Canada ended up firing him outright once he started publicly comparing the federal government to Communist Poland and Nazi Germany.
Metrication would also spur one of Canada’s first-ever Charter challenges. The charter of rights and freedoms was only a few months old – having been entered into force in April 1982 – and a group known as Measure Canadian argued in a lawsuit that its guarantees on “freedom of thought, … and expression” didn’t jibe with Ottawa’s policy of fining and even shutting down businesses if they dared to advertise their wares in pounds or yards.
And then, you get a truly magnificent piece of Canadian political theatre: A protest gas station. Officially called the Freedom to Measure service station, it was an Ottawa-area gas station owned by 37 MPs from the Opposition Progressive Conservatives. Gas at this station was actually a bit more expensive than in the rest of Ottawa, but it was by-the-gallon, and thus a middle finger to the Metric Commission. There were lineups every morning and every evening — with some patrons reportedly travelling from as far as 50 miles away — or, 80 km away. And other gas stations followed. In Victoria, B.C., for one, Pay Less Gas defied federal mandates by having one of its locations sell gas by the gallon, even while all the others continued selling by the litre. So how did this all end? It ended with this guy.
Clip: Well, I, you know, I — what can I say?
Hopper: That’s Brian Mulroney. Nearly a decade and a half of Liberal government rule came to a decisive end in the 1984 federal election and one of the leading promises of the new government was that all this metric tyranny was coming to an end. The Mulroney government didn’t reverse metrication. They just stopped being jerks about it. The Government of Canada would still deal exclusively in metric, as they do today. But if you wanted to continue dealing in non-metric units, a government agent wouldn’t come to your office and fine you. And according to the anti-metrication camp, that’s all they ever wanted. Bill Domm — one of the owners of the Freedom to Measure gas station — told this to a reporter in 1989, long after the dust had settled and passions had cooled on the metric fight: “The only objection I ever had was the prohibition of imperial.”
McCollough: We’ve all been in the case, you know, in our personal lives, we’ve all developed our own system for doing something, and then someone comes in and they’re like, why do you do it this way? Why don’t you sort your drawer like this? Why don’t you have your clothes like that? Why you are you still using this old lamp and blah, blah, blah, and then oftentimes we get very defensive about that, because it’s like, well, maybe that’s not your system, but it’s my system, and it works for me, so don’t tell me that it’s bad. And I think that that’s that’s kind of what modern Canadian culture is when it relates to weights and measures.
Hopper: Metrication, as we mentioned, began with a “white paper.” Now in the context of Canadian politics, that word is typically associated with the much more controversial 1969 White Paper — more formally known as the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969. This was a document put out within only a few months of the metrication white paper by the same Pierre Trudeau Liberal government — and by some of the same people. The 1969 White Paper called for the wholesale extinguishment of Indian status in Canada: Rip up every treaty, repeal the Indian Act and privatize reserve land.
This proposal was so despised that it effectively launched the modern Indigenous rights movement. Now I’m not going to argue that weights and measures are in any way comparable to Crown-Indigenous policy, but there are some remarkable parallels between the two white papers. Both of them were examples of a government decreeing a new and supposedly more enlightened way of doing things. Both are filled with flowery language about a brave and inevitable future.
And neither white paper seemed to even consider the notion that people would object to a hugely disruptive remaking of the existing order. Or even that the proposed policy might make things worse. So, perhaps inevitably, both of these white papers failed. One of them immediately. And one of them took a bit longer. But make no mistake; the Canadian metrication project failed. When the RCMP puts out an alert for a missing person, they list the person’s height in feet and inches, and their weight in pounds. This is exactly what the Metric Commission didn’t want to happen.
McCollough: Another interesting analogy that went quite differently, I think would be official bilingualism, right, which was also implemented quite extensively during the during the same period in the in the 1970s and into the 80s and beyond. And that also didn’t really stick. Obviously, we’re not a functional bilingual country.
Hopper: If you’re a metric booster, the usual lesson of the metrication saga is that a good-faith effort to streamline civic society ran headlong into a stubborn and backwards citizenry. Metrication didn’t fail Canada; Canada failed metrication.
But the good news is, metric boosters may have overstated how important this all was. I direct your attention back to the United States, which rejected metric conversion even harder than we did.
You know how many Nobel Prizes the United States has won since 1970? 65; that’s a lot for a supposed retrograde backwater where highway distances are still measured in miles. They’ve landed nearly a dozen probes on Mars, including several rovers and a helicopter. They invented the internet. At the time this recording goes out, the U.S. team just destroyed the 2024 Math Olympiad, besting the usual heavyweights of China, Korea and India. And things haven’t been all that shabby for Canada either, despite the fact that we still buy vegetables by the pound, drink beer by the ounce and categorize real estate by square footage. A Canadian invented the Java programming language, which is almost certainly on the device that you are using to listen to this podcast. Canadian health researchers pioneered the Ebola vaccine, and also devised the treatment that prevented HIV from being an immediate death sentence. Given the scientific gains of the last 40 years, you might even conclude that it’s a net benefit to have a consciousness filled with two different systems of measurement that are constantly at war.
McCollough: The anti-metric critics often sort of presented the imposition of the metric system as as a form of tyranny, that this was sort of something that government was imposing upon us, and but when you look at the way it actually manifested it, government really, in many ways, imposed it upon themselves, and the rest of us just kind of had to go along with it, because we rely on government services for a whole number of things. And then again — anything that is — anything that is intimate, anything that is personal, you know, measuring the square footage of a house, measuring, you know, your foot size in inches, your waist size in inches, you know, things like that — government has not been able to, sort of, take that away from us. You can sort of say that maybe government gave up trying.
Hopper: And what is Canada if not an endless ballet of constant mental conversions? Of living in the Pacific Time Zone and having to calculate what time it is in Toronto or Halifax? Of making an online purchase in U.S. dollars, and tabulating how much that’s going to cost you in Canadian dollars. Of tipping 15 per cent if you’re at a sit-down restaurant, 10 per cent if you’re taking a cab and not at all if you’re picking up a takeout order. Of knowing just how much cheese and booze you can bring back from a foreign trip without it being seized at the border. Maybe it was foolish to ever think that one measuring system would ever be enough to encompass the majesty of this nation. Every inch, furlong and decimetre of it.
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