CANADA | METRIC SYSTEM | CURRENCY

Canadians Are a Bit Loonie

And it isn’t just about the money

I’ll never forget the moment I realized how damn confused we are as Canadians!

After reading Michael Burg, MD (Satire Sommelier)’s latest article I’m Transitioning …. To the Metric System, I had to laugh. I had been thinking of writing an article about Canada’s whacky measurement system, so I am grateful for his inspiration to do so.

It goes like this.

We were traveling in Bulgaria at the time. Our German friend, Nico, had come from Germany to visit us and we spent 10 days exploring around the country with him.

One day, as we were climbing fortress towers in Veliko Tarnovo, he asked me what my height is, to which I replied 5'9". For those that don’t know, this means 5 feet and 9 inches.

He looked at me astonished. “I thought Canada was on the metric system!”

To which I immediately replied, “Oh well…….yes it is…….sort of.”

I was stuttering my words a bit as I realized that we definitely are on the metric system, we were taught that in school, but feet and inches are definitely not.

I stared at him with my mouth agape. It was like one of those scenes where all of the math symbols were floating in the air around my head. My brain was having a strange hiccup, you might say, as I digested this realization.

A hilarious conversation ensued as I tried to explain that, yes, Canada is officially on the metric system as a country, but Canadian citizens are certainly not entirely on board with it.

Here are a few examples of why.

If I’m to measure the length of something, as I did with my height, I’m much more comfortable measuring in feet and inches than I am in meters and centimeters. In fact, the majority (if not all) of the construction world in our country operates in feet and inches. I’m sure the immigrants who come here to work in construction are brutally confused about this.

The same goes for weights. I’m not ashamed to admit that I weigh approximately 160 pounds (I’m a broad broad!). What do I weigh in kilograms? I don’t really know. But I suppose I could look at my driver's license because it tells my height in meters and my weight in kilograms. I keep thinking I will memorize those numbers at some point, but I haven’t.

Our temperatures are in Celsius and our distances are in kilometers. Full stop. However, some Canadians, usually farmers from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, do prefer to use Fahrenheit to measure temperature and miles to measure distance. Chris, who is from southern Saskatchewan, figures that it has to do with the old ways of doing things, plus maybe the way that land is measured.

Farmers mostly measure land in acres and sections, which is not metric.

When we are shopping for food in the grocery store we usually shop for pounds of things. But despite us wanting a pound, the labels are all in grams and kilograms. So, we Canadians know the conversion. When we are shopping for ground beef, for example, and want a pound of it, we know to look for packages that have approximately 450 grams marked on them.

We also shop for ‘pounds’ of coffee amongst other things.

For volume, we do use liters and milliliters, but we will also get a shot of alcohol which is one ounce, and a pint of beer when we are in the bar. Don’t ask me what those measurements are in milliliters, I have no idea.

Gasoline is measured in liters, but people still calculate the mileage on their cars as ‘miles to the gallon.’ We also have buckets that are widely known as 5-gallon buckets.

And of course, Canada has its own football (this is different than football in the rest of the world) and its stadium is measured in yards. Go figure.

So, if you are traveling to Canada, be forewarned that when talking about measurements with the locals, you may get as damn confused as us!

Currency

While I’m here, and because I’ve used the title that I have, I figured this was also a good place to introduce our currency. Like the US, our currency is broken down into dollars and cents. $1 = 100 cents. Geez, that seems awfully metric to me!?

As you can see in the lead photo, we use a ‘loonie’ as our one-dollar coin. It is named after the common loon that can be found floating on many bodies of water in our country. Their melodic cries can be heard from a long distance away and when I hear it I am drawn right back to my childhood days of camping in the wilderness. I’m sure that many Canadians have similar stories and recollections of loons.

This coin was introduced in 1987 to replace our dollar bill. The artwork was done by famed wildlife artist Robert-Ralph Carmichael.

But the word ‘loony’ is a different thing altogether.

And this is what I think we Canadians are for our whacky ways of thinking!

Of course, we couldn’t just stop with the loonie, we had to continue on and invent the toonie.

In 1996 a $2 coin was introduced. Despite it having a polar bear on it, the powers that be decided it should be called a toonie to join in the nomenclature of its predecessor.

According to Wikipedia:

“Toonie” is a portmanteau word combining the number “two” with the name of the loonie, Canada’s one-dollar coin. It is occasionally spelled “twonie” or “twoonie”, but Canadian newspapers and the Royal Canadian Mint use the “toonie” spelling.

I remember there being talk of it being named a ‘doubloon’ at one point, but that obviously didn’t stick.

And while I’m at it, here is the rest of our currency. We don’t have strange names for any other bills or coins, I don’t think.

Well, I guess they may seem strange to others. Here are our other coin names:

25 cents is a quarter.

10 cents is a dime.

5 cents is a nickel.

And finally, 1 cent is a penny, but these have been discontinued in Canada and all totals are rounded up or down to the nearest 5 or 10 cents.

Does this make us even more loony?

We even invented a vertical $10 bill back in 2018 that features Viola Desmond. Viola is compared to the USA’s Rosa Parks, but in her case, she refused to leave a white-only movie theatre back in 1946.

The Bank of Canada’s website will fill you in on the details where she is named A Bank NOTE-able Canadian Woman

Viola Desmond remains an icon of the human rights and freedoms movement in Canada. A successful Nova Scotia businesswoman, she defiantly refused to leave a whites-only area of a movie theatre in 1946 and was subsequently jailed, convicted and fined. Her court case was one of the first known legal challenges against racial segregation brought forth by a Black woman in Canada.

In conclusion

I suppose our confusion about all of this comes from the US and their downright refusal to adopt the metric system like most of the rest of the world. We share a huge border and American influence has infiltrated every aspect of Canada, for sure.

And while the US generally thinks that they are right and everybody else is wrong, I like to think that Canada, as it does, refuses to step on anyone's toes, and just wants us all to get along.

Being the peacekeepers that we are, we are okay with having a little of both worlds.

But I will let my Canadian modesty drop for a minute to say that above all, you can not deny that our currency, despite being worth less than the US dollar, is so much prettier, even if we are a bit loonie:)

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