Just heard an interview on CBC Radio with a fellow (Mike) in Camden, Manitoba. He related his story about helping a trucker who lost a load of young piglets round them all up and put them back into the trailer.
It turns out one of the piglets managed to evade detection and then later came over to Mike's land where she joined up with his Alaskan Husky dog who had recently weaned a litter of pups. So far, the new piglet (Babe) is being kept as a pet. I was interested in hearing how this fellow, who sounded like he was in his thirties, would use any measurement units while telling his tale. Sure enough, he talked about how the truck had lost its load about "half a mile" down the road and how the piglet had grown while eating dog food (which it liked better than pig feed) about "50 pounds". Not a hint of metric and no parenthetical conversions by the CBC interviewer from Imperial to metric either (such as adding "roughly a kilometre, then" when Mike mentioned the distance from his land to where the truck lost its load as "half a mile"). Thus, pure Imperial from the interviewee and tacit acceptance of Imperial by the interviewer. And that's the way it is still among the younger generation of Canadians (educated entirely in metric) in 2009. Ah, well ... Cheers, Ezra
