A Presentation Comparing Metrication in Australia and Canada

One presentation at the Canadian Political Science Association’s annual conference at the University of Ottawa caught my attention as soon as the main conferenceprogram first went online. Patrick L. Desjardins of the University of Ottawa presented a paper cleverly entitled “Give Them an Inch, and They’ll Take 1.6093 Kilometers: Explaining Divergent Metrication Outcomes in Australia and Canada” at a panel just before mine on the afternoon of June 2^nd. Funnily enough, attending this panel almost made me arrive late for my own, because the elevators in the Faculty of Social Sciences Building became bogged down in between each set of panels and almost impossible to use. I then rushed down the stairs – considerably better than trundling up them – to the ground floor where my panel took place.

Desjardin’s argument to explain why Australia fully metricated while Canada only half-metricated in the 1970s and 1980s (shorn of this academic gobbledegook of “exogenous” this and “exogenous” that) boils down to the hard facts of trade and geopolitics combined with the happenstance of elections. However, I believe that cultural factors played a larger role in Canada’s reluctance to metricating that he suggested.

First, he mentioned that Australian industry started pushing for Metrication to make trading with West Germany, South Korea, and Japan easier; here, I would add to Desjardin’s thesis that the collapse of the British Empire after the absurd Suez Crisis of 1956 (which, incidentally, sounds like a fake and overly elaborate conspiracytheory if you explain it to someone unfamiliar with it, even though it did, in fact, happen) hit Australia and New Zealand far harder than Canada, both economically and psychologically, as did the United Kingdom’s determination to join what was then known as the European Economic Community. Australia and New Zealand saw Britain’s move toward Continental European integration as a betrayal and maternal abandonment more so that we did in Canada, given that we had after the War tethered ourselves more to the United States.

In contrast, Metrication in Canada emerged as yet another grandiose and rationalist dirigiste project of Pierre Trudeau and this famous White Paper on Metric Conversion in Canada from 1970.[1] The simple facts of geography and history mean that Australia does not have to contend with the United States in the same way that Canada does. The bulk of our trade transacts with the United States, a country which had no interest in switching to Metric, despite Jimmy Carter’s efforts. This took away Canada’s economic incentive to metricate and almost inevitably made metrication a rationalist project of the State instead of a practical matter for the private sector, as in Australia. Industry in Canada simply never clamoured for centimeters over inches, grams over ounces, and liters over gallons. And this left no one better than Pierre Trudeau, every professor’s favourite prime minister, to impose the project, irrespective of popular support.

Second, as Desjardins pointed out, a Liberal-National (i.e., center-right) government first embraced metrication in Australia, and Labor (center-left) followed suit. As “only Nixon could go to China,” only conservatives of British descent in the Anglosphere could begin the switch from Imperial to Metric without provoking strong and deeply emotive opposition in certain pockets of the electorate. In contrast, the elections of 1979 and 1980s and the year of chaos and alternating Liberal and Conservative and Liberal governments created uncertainty and delays, which had not happened in Australia because both the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor (as they spell it) supported Metrication.

The discussant on this panel concluded in his comments on Desjardin’s paper – in such a predictably and particularly incorrect way that only an academic obsessed with “neo-liberalism” (always intoned as a slur) could ever utter – that Mulroney made Metric optional again in 1985 to kow-tow to Reagan when, in fact, he was merely responding to organic public opinion in Canada generated by the second Trudeau government’s excess and pig-headedness, as well as splits within the Conservative Party on the issue. Canadians resisted and objected to metrication because the White Paper from 1970 proposed making it optional (“No legislative action is contemplated which would make mandatory a general use of metric in place of inch-pound units”)[2], while the Trudeau government later secured amendments to the Weights and Measures Act to make Metric mandatory and implemented mandatory Metrication in phases by order-in-council, and then kept deliberately pushing it in the face of public opposition and unrest. It’s really not any more complicated than that. The economic rationale for Metrication also never existed, given that the United States, Canada’s largest trading partner, had never truly committed to making the switch.

Metrication became too perfect of a lightning rod against Pierre Trudeau within English Canada, because the dirigisme necessary to impose new units of measurement by brute force once the economic case for it had evapourated aligned with the other pseudo-rationalist statism and grandiose projects that Trudeau embraced, like nationalising part of our oil industry through Petro-Canada and siphoning off Alberta’s royalties to subsidize cheap gasoline for Ontarians and Quebeckers through the National Energy Program. Trudeau’s second government had already planned as of 31 March 1983 on dismantling the Metric Commission of Canada by 31 March 1985, given that “the foundation has been laid for the successful completion of the conversion to metric in Canada.”[3] And the Mulroney government never tried to de-Metricate Canada either; it simply made Metric optional instead of using the power of the State to force industries to adopt units of measurement that their customers did not want to use.[4]

The CBC Destroyed Its Own Video Archive of Metrication in Canada

Desjardins also showed some other funny things about which I had not known and which point to some amusing cultural differences between Canada and Australia. Metrication in Australia gained a mascot called “Metric Kate” – a pun on “Metricate” which sounds especially funny with the triple vowels of Australian accents – which made metrication fun. The cartoon Metric Kate sported an hourglass figure of 90-60-90 centimeters. As he was going through this bit of his presentation, my mind wandered, and I almost started laughing as I thought to myself that Metric Kate would have offended various sensibilities in this staid and priggish country, especially in the neo-Victorian epicenter of Toronto. And sure enough, as I discovered while researching for this post, CBC News ran an amusing retrospective on metrication in 2025, which included some of the CBC’s own archival footage from the mid-1970s which confirmed my initial instinct.[5]

At 1:47 into the video, CBC News’ contemporary narrator says, “With that, they [the Metrication Commission] set out to inform Canadians, but not all of their marketing campaigns went over well, like this ad in the early ’70s.” The CBC, being the CBC, refused to show us as viewers in the mid-2020s “this ad from the early 70s” which caused such great offence; instead, we must simply take the CBC’s all-knowing word for it. I would expect nothing less from an organisation that deliberately nuked its own online archives a few years ago and did its utmost to deprive English-speaking Canadians of their own audio-visual history. But we can infer that the Metrication Commission of Canada had also tried to adopt Metric Kate, based on what the CBC’s unnamed reporter from the 1970s had said at the time:

“In sexist days of yore, a woman’s figure was given a linear translation, by a tapemeasure. Well, the Metric Commission thought that was a good idea, so they produced a poster with a young woman on it and a caption reading, ‘Girls measuring 90-60-90 are inevitable.’ The women’s division of the Department of Labour didn’t think that this was such a good idea, and the poster was pulled. So now we’ll have to learn our Metrics another way.”

[https://youtu.be/B5zCyUGW9-0?si=ouwbP_kvr_YDfdIt&t=107]

Incidentally, CBC Archives once devoted an entire section the history of Canada’s partial Metrication called “For Good Measure: Canada Converts to Metric”, which included nine videos and eleven audio files. This series fell under the broader category of “Science and Technology – Measurement.” Now all that remains is a dead letter on the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, where you can see the sitemap but can no longer watch the videos or listen to the old radio interviews. I regret not having saved all this material in the early 2010s when I first watched it.

A Great Irony of Canadian History

As Desjardins and the Canadian Encyclopedia note, Canada converted to Metric in phases starting in the mid-1970s: first, from gauging temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius on 1 April 1975; second, from measuring rain and snow in inches to in millimeters and centimeters in September 1975; third, changing distance from miles to kilometers in automobiles and on roadsigns in September 1977; and, fourth, changing how we measured volume from the Imperial Gallon (4.54 liters) to liters in January 1979. The Metric Commission’s unintentionally hilarious propaganda paper, The Metric Monitor, confirms that “fuel oil meters on delivery trucks convert to metric this month”, in June 1979.[6] However, the Clark government decided on 11 December 1979 to delay when we would switch from measuring mass in pounds to kilograms in retail “for a minimum of one year”[7] in light of the pilot project on converting scales from pounds to kilograms in Sherbrooke, Peterborough, and Kamloops. (The Cabinet Conclusions from 30 October 1979 show that the Clark government had first considered delaying the shift from pounds to kilograms at that earlier meeting.[8])

I first suggested nearly ten years ago in my review of Michael Healey’s excellent and amusing play 1979 that the Clark government would have survived the new federal excise tax on gasoline if John “short-term pain for long-term gain” Crosbie had presented it as 4 cents per liter instead of as 18 cents per Imperial Gallon; arithmetically, they are nearly identical, but psychologically, the two units of measurement make all the difference in the world. If we had switched to liters in, say, April 1977, instead of in January 1979, then enough time would have passed and enough gas stations would have started selling fuel by the liter that Crosbie would have presented a new federal excise tax in Metric without rousing such vociferous opposition. The Clark government would have survived a crucial vote on supply, stayed in power at least a few months longer, and until after the Liberals had elected a new leader in the spring of 1980. Even if Joe Clark had still provoked the House of Commons too much after “governing as though he had a majority” by the winter of 1980, Pierre Trudeau would never have become prime minister again and returned with that taunt “Well, welcome to the 1980s,” and Canadian political history would have flowed along a different course.

Another grand historical irony abounds. Crosbie presented the new federal excise tax on gasoline as a way of conserving energy and lowering demand for fuel in the aftermath of the Second Oil Shock of 1979, and perhaps as a way of making sure that the Government of Canada could then later avoid the even more unpopular policy of rationing fuel at the pumps directly, like the Americans and British had done. But this excise tax would have achieved the same outcome as a carbontax – sorry, as a “price on carbon”: making fuel more expensive so that Canadians would use less of it and thereby reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from the transportation sector. In other words, Conservatives wanted something akin to a carbontax, while Liberals pledged to repeal something akin to a carbontax. If we had switched to Metric earlier and more completely, the Clark government might have survived a tax of four cents per liter instead of one of 18 cents per Imperial Gallon, and we might therefore have started lowering carbonemissions in the late 1970s and 1980s, which, in turn, would have allowed Canada to meet the goals eventually established by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 much more easily. That said, Canada alone could not have done much on its own to keep the average increase in global temperatures relative to before the Industrial Revolution to below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Conclusion

Overall, Metrication in Canada failed, and we have ended up with a half-conversion at best, because Canadians had become exhausted over it all by 1983. The Trudeau government charged Jack Halpert for selling fuel by the Imperial Gallon instead of by the liter at his gas station in Toronto and lost when a superior court ruled mandatory metrication unconstitutional;[9] however, the appellate court overturned that ruling and allowed making Metric mandatory again after all.[10] The infamous “Gimli Glider” came about n 1983 when Air Canada fuelled up a Boeing 767 in pounds instead of kilograms, which mean that she was carrying less than half of the fuel that she needed to fly from Montreal to Edmonton.[11] Neil Fraser, a civil servant at Revenue Canada believed that “the freedom to measure is a measure of our freedom;” the Trudeau government suspended him after he denounced mandatory metrication and attended a local municipal council meeting on the subject.[12] Amidst all this regulatory confusion, public exhaustion, and declining political will, retailers had spent so much money on the Trudeau government’s mandatory metrication by 1983 that they refused to switch back to Imperial afterwards.[13] By November 1983, the Globe and Mail ran an article on “Metric Malaise” in Canada and argued: “The Government may be justified in requiring that all services be offered in metric, since consumer protection demands that there be a basis for comparison between goods and outlets. But there is no justification, short of dragging people kicking and screaming into metric in the name of pedagogy, to stop people from trading in Imperial units as well.”[14]

Canadians probably objected more to the switch to Metric in mass and volume (from pounds and gallons to grams and liters) for two reasons: first, we buy most things by mass or volume and form familiarity with them; and, second, because the private sector, and many small businesses, had to bear the brunt of metrication in mass and volume, while governments absorbed the cost of metricating distance from miles to meters and replacing all those roadsigns. While the automakers did not have to spend all that much money to put kilometers on top of miles on odometers either, replacing scales and changing the calibrations of pumps at gas stations cost a great deal.

Imperial lives on even in the hearts of those of us born in the late 1980s, and the majority of my generation still uses customary units in everyday life. While we all use kilometers for distance and Celsius for temperature and now liters for gasoline or diesel at the pump, we did not adopt the latter in time to have spared the Clark government its fate in December 1979. To this day, we lie about our weight in pounds – even though kilograms would make a far more effective instrument for dissembling and obscuring such embarrassments – and we give our height in feet and inches, even though centimeters might help the men who struggle to meet the de facto minimum of six feet on dating apps. But 182.88 centimeters just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Many of us still bake using cups instead of in milliliters or grams or whatever. Pounds and feet especially have endured, perhaps because they seem more compact and portable. I also still measure tirepressure in pounds per square inch instead of Kilopascals and torque in pound-feet instead of in Newton-Meters when I change over my tires twice each year and re-torque the lugnuts with that satisfying click of my torquewrench.

What proponents of Metric have always failed to grasp is that even though Metric units are more logical, being based on ten and consistent across orders of magnitude, they are not necessarily more intuitive, especially not in a society where Metric lacks deep roots. We built this country on Stephenson’s Standard Gauge railway with Imperial, and the Americans went to the moon on Imperial, though they would say “customary units” or something like that instead. Switching from Imperial to Metric in Canada truly does require the brute force of the State to counteract both the massive gravitational pull of the United States and to break the organic links that entwined generations together and rooted Anglo-Canadian society in a British inheritance. In any event, I hope that Patrick Desjardins pursues his project and expands it into an article or a book, given that so little in the way of academic history on Canada’s partial metrication exists.

Similar Posts: 

• “I Had No Option”: How John Turner Became Pierre Trudeau’s Patronage Patsy in 1984 (September 2024)
• A Review of the Play 1979 and Joe Clark’s Legacy (August 2017)

Notes

• Globe and Mail (1982-02-10) Second Suspension over Metric Protest
• Globe and Mail (1983-04-07) Forced Metrication Unconstitutional
• Globe and Mail (1983-07-30) Metric Mix Up Forced Jet Down
• Globe and Mail (1983-09-11) Metric No Infringement
• Globe and Mail (1983-11-02) Superior Court Strikes Down Mandatory Metrication
• Globe and Mail (1983-12-01) Staying with Metric
• Globe and Mail (1983-11-03) Metric Malaise
• Globe and Mail (1984-02-06) Food Labelling Company Fined
• Globe and Mail (1984-05-16) Pro Bono Metric Appeal
• Globe and Mail (1985-01-31) Metric Still in Force

[1] Government of Canada, Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce, White Paper on Metric Conversion in Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce, January 1970).  

[2] Government of Canada, Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce, White Paper on Metric Conversion in Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce, January 1970), at paragraph 1.6 and page 5.

[3] Government of Canada, Work Plan for the Phase-Out of MCC: Final Report (Ottawa: Consumer and Corporate Affairs Canada, 31 March 1983), at page i.

[4] Globe and Mail, “Metric Still In Force, But Imperial Allowed,” 31 January 1985, at page 1.

[5] CBC News, “Why Did Canada Switch to Metric?” 22 March 2025.

[6] Government of Canada, Metric Commission of Canada, “Sector Target Dates,” Metric Monitor, volume 6, number 6 (June 1979): 6.

[7] Government of Canada, Library and Archives Canada, “Cabinet Conclusions – December 11, 1979,” at page 10.

[8] Government of Canada, Library and Archives Canada, “Cabinet Conclusions – October 30, 1979,” at page 17.

[9] Globe and Mail, “Constitutional Violated, Court Told: Forced Metric Sale of Gasoline Illegal, Lawyer Says,” 7 April 1983, at page 1; Globe and Mail, “Judge Rules Gasoline May Be Sold in Gallons,” 2 November 1983, at A1.

[10] Globe and Mail, “Metric Law No Infringement, Court Told,” 11 September 1984, at M3.

[11] Globe and Mail, “Metric Fuel Mix Up Forced Jet Down, Air Canada Admits,” 30 July 1983, at page 1.

[12] Globe and Mail, “Second Suspension over Metric Protect,” 10 February 1982, at page 10.

[13] Globe and Mail, “Too Late to Turn Back: Staying with Metric, Big Retailers Say,” 1 December 1983, at page 4.

[14] Globe and Mail, “Metric Malaise,” 4 November 1983, at page 6.