How to measure things like a Canadian?

I find everyone uses time for long distances. I know it’s a 13 hour drive to Edmonton but damned if I know how many kilometres it is.

As a German I have to ask... why? It's just sad at that point

I'm Canadian and I measure in metric. Imperial units can go die a painful and fiery death. The sooner the better.

I feel like long distace should be time not metric or imperial.

We prefer metric mostly, but so much of our stuff comes from or is sold to the states, so we don't have much choice but to use both systems.

Anoying af.

Yeah, basically. I think it kind of depends on your age though. I was almost 100% metric with the exception of baking until my teens or so (we never had a pool).

A lot of it comes from getting stuff from the US. Most of the cookbooks you find here come from the US so they use US measurement. Doing construction? The lumber's cut to sell to the US market so you may as well use US measurement when you work with it. Steel lengths are usually available in metric so commercial construction is metric too. I've done a fair amount of construction and land surveying so I can do most length conversions like that in my head.

Temperature, though, I'm hopeless with Fahrenheit. Some older folk will still prefer °F to °C all the time but to me it's just numbers. Most of my life is spent between -30°C and +30°C so it works out very conveniently as a nice symmetrical gauge between "cold winter day" and "hot summer day."

The rest, well, it's mostly just the unitary form of peer pressure. You just sort of pick it up. The really wild thing is that I might say something like "oh yeah, my cat weighs 5 lbs, so she's like half the weight of one of those 5-kilo bags of flour" without irony.

Objection! "Work" being imperial implies science isn't work. I'd feel better if it said "construction" or "industry".

A lot of these are more to do with age or products imported from the US than anything. For example with the temperature one, I would never give the temperature of anything in f, but my parents' hot tub only displays temperature in f. Also my parents follow a flowchart like this much more than I do because they grew up with a more mixed system. Like they will sometimes give distance in miles whereas I would only ever in km. However there are some of these that even I do. Like I would only ever give my height and weight on feet, inches, and pounds.

I’m pissed we don’t use ISO 216 (A4, A5, B-series, etc.) paper. Almost changed in 1974 but lost our nerve.

Don't forget we also measure distance by travel time. I have to Google the KM distance from Ottawa to Toronto but I know it's around 4 hours and 20 minutes traffic allowing.

Cooking flip flops the most..... Usually baking is Imperial ( ferenheit/cups/teaspoon/tablespoon/ounce (weight), fl oz (volume), etc)... But in a single recipe, I've turned on the oven to 350F, and mixed a teaspoon of one ingredient into 300 mL of another, then added 300g of a third with an 8oz can of another.

It's just completely random, even within a single recipe.

It's pretty accurate. Believe it or not, one of our most infamous aviation near-disasters in Canada (the Gimli Glider) happened because someone made a mistake converting fuel quantities between metric & imperial.

My favourite thing is when we get to use awful combinations of both systems, like measuring out 15g of coffee for 12oz of water. Or having 26" bike wheels inflated to 30psi but attached to the bike with a 10mm axle. I especially love kcals and mmHg.

Myself, I measure water temp in Celsius (pools, aquariums, lakes, oceans...), but yeah pretty damn accurate.

I use metric for all distances, and celcius for all temperatures... except my oven, but if i could change that to C, I would.

"Cups and spoons"!?

This chart has been around for a long time and is getting out of date. It should now be called: How Older Canadians Measure Things. Younger Canadians are getting a lot more metric.

For example none of the younger people at my office know their weight in imperial. The most they knew were some baby weights they had to convert to imperial for their parents.

Forgot about deli meet for the weight. It's always "I want 300 grams of sliced black forest ham", and not whatever that is in imperial. Do they use ounces for that?

I've never needed to use imperial for long distances for work? Not sure what that's about.

And don't get me started on woodworking or the construction industry. Plywood panels are length and width in imperial but thickness in metric or imperial.

If you're looking for some logic in this mess, it's that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.

So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we're forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we've stuck to old habits.

This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we'd only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.

Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it's just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)

I convert recipe measurements to millilitres because it's way easier to scale a recipe up and down that way.

I use a set of laboratory graduated cylinders in the kitchen for measuring the ingredients.

Saw this posted couple of days ago, but then it was "... Like a british person". What and WHEN is The Orginal?

Speaking as a Canadian and a millenial, I would say this is completely true. For example, right now my AC reads 72F, whch is right where I like it in this 25-35C weather.

It's perfectly accurate for where i live in Québec.

I use metric for everything but I use lbs for weight.

For weight, they forgot to add: if it's for advertising a price, it's in $/lbs (though you will be charged in $/kg). The butcher knows damn well that steaks advertised at $15/lbs sell better than steaks at $33/kg.

Around here (rural southern Saskatchewan), imperial still has a stronghold because of our roads, farming, and other factors. Our roads are laid out on a 1 mile grid (some places it's 2 miles north-south) and a square mile is 1 section of land (640 acres).

Even the kids who've never learned any imperial measures still use at least miles for distance when driving the grids. (And that's what we call them: grid roads, not gravel roads or any other designation.) Even equipment without odometers can follow a set of directions like "4 miles north and 3 miles west" because you just count intersections.

Even our legal land locations are given using these ancient units. So I live at NW 19-20-10 W3 and every emergency service and business who needs to knows how to find me.

Fun fact: there are very few flat-earthers around here because of something called a "correction line." The square grid doesn't fit the curved surface, so the roads that (approximately) follow the meridians (lines of longitude) need to be offset every so often to keep them parallel. The roads that intersect those offsets are called "correction line roads" and are used as landmarks when giving directions.

I don't know about pool temperature, but water temperature in the lake and indoor temperature are imperial with outdoor temperature in Celsius. Usually. :)

It’s only true if you are over 55-60.

I’m 50, and almost never use Imperial. Especially temperature - like, who TF uses Fahrenheit? It makes absolutely no sense in almost every context.

Pretty accurate and its due to trade with the USA.

For example I wanted small nuts and screws for a project. Got metric from Amazon and I needed M2 screw and nuts.

But when I tried to get it sourced by a local company in NS, they didn't have the metric nuts and the screws where expensive.

So I found a closes size I could get in imperial, #2-56. They didn't just have them, but they were pennies per unit.

It's easy, because of the proximity to the States and the fact that we still have generations in Canada that were alive PRIOR to metric who have handed it down, we're more or less raised with it. I can't speak for others, but I can pretty freely convert between the two (at least very close, I can't completely convert Celsius and Fahrenheit in my head).

But yeah, that's pretty accurate as to how everyday measurements go here. I'm trying to think of others, but I think this covers most/all of them.

American ex-pat/Canadian permanent resident here. This is all pretty accurate in my experience, though I can't speak on using Imperial for work-related measurements or pool temperature. Just this morning I had to describe our current bout of cool weather in Ferenheit to my friends back home, and was reminded all over again how ridiculous it is that the US still isn't on metric. This rings especially true whenever I call my mom. Seems like I have to "Hey Google" conversions in every conversation we have. Before my dad died he would keep his weather app on Celcius to report the weather to me in metric. I honestly love that he felt compelled to do that.

It was a little weird getting used to the metric system initially, but I honestly prefer it at this point. I used to argue that you could be more precise with Farenheit, as the scale was broader. However, I've since come to realize that no one cares whether it was 74° or 76°.

Where I live its generally imperial for estimating something at a glance, and metric for actually measuring something.

My father hauls liquids in Canada. Never leaves the province. But on his reports he must note metric and imperial gallon.

I don't have to watch the show to know it is true. When I was in middle school we had to learn conversions for all of these (except °C to °F, cause that's too hard).

They missed an important one. If it's distance related to COVID, it's measured in hockey sticks.

Okay, yeah that all seems correct to me lol. It sure does make us sound crazy though!

I'm pretty happy to have non-zero competency in all the systems lol. I'm a regular hobby crafter, and honestly some projects just work better in metric, some are better in imperial.

Yup pretty accurate (quebec)

Volume for drinks is also Imperial in my experience.

16oz/20oz beer, 5oz wine, 1oz liquor, etc

Many things make sense now

This is highly inaccurate. Human height is done in cm.

My head hurts.

Ontario checking in, 100% accurate. Actually I would add home temperature (like the thermostat) under F, but body temperature (like checking if you have a fever) under C. Also we're so used Americans using miles for distance/speed we'll sometimes use it in idioms ("They ran out of here at 100 miles per hour!”). I never realized this change between measuring systems wasn't the norm until I started chatting with Europeans.

Australia we still use some legacy units such as psi instead of kPa or Bar in common parlance. This stems from our parents using this. Kids nowadays will probably adopt kPa, as it's in all the door jams of cars.

Naw, metric for everything except cooking temp and body weight.

If I had a pool, I would probably hate if I had to set the temperature in black and white; so I would look for a pool that specifically uses Colour.

This is extremely accurate, as far as I've seen in western Canada.

the fun thing is that this graph is more-or-less accurate (I don't have a pool so I can't judge that one) for me despite being an American with no connection to Canada.

I came in here hoping to understand how to measure a Canadian. Height or circumference at least…

I have a better idea: just use metric.

I try to fully metrify my workplace and my teammates are receptive because everyone knows imperial units suck.

I always use milliliters and grams for cooking, unless it’s measuring volume of something solid.

I also use time for long distances.

I only use fare height when forced through the means of technology that for some reason hasn't been legislated to provide sane units mandatorily when sold in Canada

The exceptions to this would be lumber. Then occasionally I get pissed off at any Canadian company (or even government form) that refuses to follow our own standards. For instance federally, its recemmoneded to use YYYY-MM-DD unless you're writing out the month with three letters or more in which case you can use the insane states method. Yet consistently in forms I input the date wrong cause they do whatever that other format is