On the move, but not always round. In 1983, a Boeing 747 from Air Canada, who left for Montreal for Edmonton, had to land urgently in Manitoba. The device of the aircraft had only been completed due to poor calculation of the metric units.
An unfinished conversion
The election of Brian Mulroney at the head of the country in 1985 still changed the situation. The new progressive-conservative Prime Minister abolishes the Metric System Commission created in 1971. From now on, the SI, in implementation for 10 years, will be voluntary.
But the system is there to stay, especially in government bodies. Canadians, however, still live, 50 years later, in two parallel universes. We drive in kilometers, but a good part of the population continues to measure their size and their building materials in feet and inches, and their weight in books.
The external and interior temperatures are measured in Celsius, but in several cottages, the Fahrenheit oven are heated. And a snow foot seems more concrete than 30 centimeters.
At the grocery store, the vast majority of products are sold in grams or milliliters, but the price in the book prevails for meat, with the conversion to pounds displayed more discreetly. The butter is well sold “metric”, in packaging of 454 grams, even if we persist in saying that we buy a butter book.
