Climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, David Phillips, says a change introduced 50 years ago today was viewed at the time as a possible April Fool’s joke. It was the introduction of metric system.

Climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada David Phillips says 50 years ago on April 1st residents of Saskatchewan had been told to expect a cold start to the month where 41 degrees Fahrenheit would be the normal daytime high, but the forecast indicated the mercury would only reach 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

“When they woke up on April 1st, they said the high today is going to be -9.5 and they thought what has happened? Is the ice age hath cometh but really it was the arrival of Celsius.”

Phillips says there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for the change and Environment Canada was essentially the guinea pig for the metric system. It started with temperature changing from Fahrenheit to Celsius. He says then precipitation went to snow in centimetres and rain in millimetres and about a year after that wind became kilometres per hours not miles per hour. It started April 1st because that is the beginning of the government’s new fiscal year.

However, when U.S. president Ronald Reagan did away with Gerald Ford’s Metric Act and the Metric Board, the Canadian Conservative government of the day followed suit and now Canadians primarily have a mixed system with distance in kilometres, fuel in litres, weight in pounds, height in feet.