Environment Canada's adoption of Celsius for weather temperature in 1975 marked a significant milestone in Canada's national metric conversion. While the switch initially faced resistance, it eventually became the norm, with Canadians now using Celsius for everyday measurements.
It was the catalyst of a lengthy national metric conversion that abruptly ended a decade after it began.
“To hell with the weather maps and figures in Celsius,” wrote one senior in a letter to the London Free Press.“Since those experts changed from the old Fahrenheit thermometers, the weather's been lousy,” an angry reader told The Bridgewater Bulletin in Nova Scotia. One month into the switch, the head of Canada’s Metric Commission, Stevenson Gossage, said negative reactions were “dying down."Then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government formed the Metric Commission in 1971, after industries called on Canada to ditch Imperial measures. Along with Celsius, the commission called for road signs to use kilometres by 1977 and gas pumps to measure in litres by 1979.It got political — and nasty.
“My take on it always was that it was the right way to go,” the 87-year-old said in a phone interview from Ottawa.“If the conversion was going to be easy for you, you had to be good at mental arithmetic. If you weren't good at mental arithmetic, it was a much more difficult proposition.” “ is just so familiar,” she said. “Most of the rulers that we're able to obtain are in Imperial. Some of them do have centimetres on them as well, but I would say a lot of them don't.”
METRIC SYSTEM CANADA TEMPERATURE CELSIUS HISTORY
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