Environment Canada's adoption of Celsius turns 50 in 2025, marking a significant milestone in Canada's long journey towards metric conversion.
EDMONTON — Happy Birthday, Celsius! Environment Canada 's use of Celsius turns 50 years old in 2025. It was the catalyst of a lengthy national metric conversion that abruptly ended a decade after it began. The result is seen and felt every day. Canadians wear clothes measured in inches and buy gas by the litre. They drink from millilitre beer cans and step on bathroom scales in pounds. They eat cereal by the gram and sub sandwiches by the foot. Give someone an inch, and they'll take a kilometre.
A bone-chilling April Fools’ Day in 1975 marked the first time Canadians used Celsius to measure weather temperature. 'We were the guinea pig,' said David Phillips with Environment and Climate Change Canada. He joined the weather service seven years before the Celsius switch. They tried to get the word out, he said. 'I remember that first little flyer that (said), 'It's no April Fools' joke.' But some tuning into TV and radio that day might not have got the memo. In a world where water freezes at 32 F, Canadians failing to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius woke up aghast at forecasts ranging from -2 C in Toronto to -27 C in Edmonton. “To hell with the weather maps and figures in Celsius,” wrote one senior in a letter to the London Free Press. The switch kicked in just as a severe storm hit the Maritimes, and some felt Celsius was to blame. “Since those experts changed from the old Fahrenheit thermometers, the weather's been lousy,” an angry reader told The Bridgewater Bulletin in Nova Scotia. Most Canadian media used both units for awhile. Some seniors near the Canada-U.S. border opted for American TV and radio for Fahrenheit-focused forecasts. By 1977, all Canadian weather reports used metric measurements. “The strategy of going to the weather service first and getting them involved really paid off,” said Phillips. One month into the switch, the head of Canada’s Metric Commission, Stevenson Gossage, said negative reactions were “dying down”
CELSIUS METRIC CONVERSION CANADA ENVIRONMENT CANADA WEATHER FORECAST
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