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Miles for casual talk, KMs for speeding tickets. Pounds when cooking, stones for people & kgs for everything else. Inches in carpentry and horsepower for cars.
In a lot of places metric is a lingua franca kind of like latin. It's used in international, formal or academic settings (like a space launch) but the average farmer speaks a local dialect more natively.
However, due to our physical and cultural proximity to the US, many consumer goods are sold in "soft-metric" quantities: 454 grams of butter, 273 milliletres of pop and so on.
Food recipes are still mostly imperial - cups, teaspoons, tablespoons and so on - though recipes by weight (e.g. for baking) come in either or both formats. Similarly, body weights are still mainly imperial (pounds but not stone) unless you're at the doctor's office, in which case your weight is taken in kilograms.
Realistically, most Canadians know both systems and routinely convert between them.
For weather, we tend to use whichever measure sounds more dramatic: Fahrenheit for hot summer days (109 degrees with the Humidex!) but Celsius for cold winter days (minus 30 with the wind chill!).
Strange...I never hear that in Ontario! Whereabouts in Canada are you?
There's only one long stretch of road in the US with metric signage, and even that's controversial: http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/10/04...
Hilariously, people in the comments on that article demand miles because they're 'English.' I sometimes think Americans secretly miss being ruled from London.
Its funny. Orwell was against the metric system, so there is a small amusing scene in 1984 where on the proles (an old man) in a bar complains that he hates liters of beer.
"'Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next."
"Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half litres - that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you."
"I likes a pint," persisted the old man. "You could 'a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man."Some farmers use a crazy set of measurement, where units vary in size from one state to another, and even between neighboring cities, and stuff with a small market use whatever their biggest market use (what normaly means, whatever the US uses).