EDMONTON - Environment Canada's use of Celsius will be celebrating its golden birthday in 2025.
The staple of the country's weather culture stirred up confusion and anger when it was first introduced on a bone-chilling April Fools' Day in 1975.
Climatologist David Phillips says those used to Imperial measurements may have seen it as a joke when they heard below-zero weather forecasts.
Celsius 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, as Canadians wear clothes measured in inches, buy gas by the litre, drink from millilitre beer cans and step on bathroom scales in pounds.
Reactions to the change turned nasty, with some members of Parliament championing anti-metric petitions and risking jail time by boycotting the rules.
Jonathan Gossage, whose father led Canada's metric commission, says the transition worked out, since younger generations are now raised with metric as their primary unit of measurement.
But woodworker Liam Brownrigg of Vancouver says he works in Imperial since much of the material he buys is measured that way, and switching now would be a pain.
