^ Measure your bare foot. How long is it? That's what I think the previous poster was getting at.

But your ?? is fair. In countries that still use the imperial system, a foot is always a foot, defined legally by national bureaus of weights and measures regardless of how long the current king's foot is. So that's not why the imperial system was replaced by the metric system. In Canada, it was a top-down, federal-government-driven decision -- the kind your Second Amendment was written to thwart -- to conform with our major trading partners. (A Japanese power plant buying a "ton" of Alberta coal expects to get 1000 kg, not 908 kg which is what an imperial ton equates to.) At the time we did this (in the 1970s) we thought that our most major trading partner, the U.S.A., was going down the same path but your effort fizzled, leaving Canada (as usual) with one foot in America and the other in the rest of the world.

The best reason for "going metric" was that primary-school math teachers no longer could pretend it was educationally useful to assign homework problems like finding the number of inches in 13 2/3 furlongs. But I miss the sound, the Anglo-Saxon bluntness, of the old one- or two- syllable units resonating with historical tradition back to the Domesday book: ounce, inch, pound, mile, pint, rod, acre, fathom, gallon..... Only the English-speaking countries used them because only to English ears do they sound right.