“Three thousand, seven hundred and ninety gram baby born in Sunderland.
Is this a record?” the News release
news asked.
If you know your metric system, you know this baby is a reasonable
eight pounds, six ounces. Trouble is, a lot of us don’t know our metric
system, even though it’s about 25 years since Canada started its great
conversion from imperial.
The spark to revisit metric in this column was lit by the Metric
Martyrs, a British group now engaged in a fight against metrification.
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to fit the rest of the European Union. But the way has been rocky.
We’re not surprised.
The Metric Martyrs got their start in 2000, when two produce sellers
refused to convert their vegetable and fruit weigh scales to metric.
They were convicted of a criminal offence and are seeking funds and
leave to appeal. In the meantime they’ve generated public support and
international media attention to their cause.
“If the metric system was so simple and easy to understand, then it
would have been adopted long ago without the need for compulsion,”
writes Neil Herron on the Metric Martyr website.
Déjˆ vu! In the Aug. 4, 1977 issue of The Western Producer, G. C.
Wohlberg of Speers, Sask., said much the same thing about metrification
timing: “It would have been much easier and less confusing 68 years ago
when I started school at the age of six, before the automobile and the
tractor, and when about the only bolt required on the homestead was the
one used in the depth control wheel on the walking plow.”
Canada’s great metric push was slowed to minor labour pains after the
Conservative government took power in the early ’80s. By then it was
too late to reverse the process, and here we sit. Describing ourselves
in pounds, feet and inches, while travelling distances in kilometres
and collecting air miles. Calculating spray rates in litres per acre,
selling cattle by the pound and buying hamburger by the kilogram.
Harvesting grain by the bushel and loading it on freighters by the
tonne.
Canadians found that some early fears about metric were unfounded,
although this letter from H. Lawson of Stettler, Alta., in the Oct. 27,
1977 Producer, gave us pause: “You can’t read highway signs, so
everyone drives faster. Myself, I try to drive the way I used to, but
these crazy signs would confuse the devil.”
Could this be the reason for the ever-increasing speed rates on our
highways?
Anyway, the amazing thing about this measurement mayhem is that it
works as well as it does. The Metric Martyrs can perhaps take comfort
in that.
