Day Month Year, as a former recent British colony would tend to… except when we use Month Day Year, no doubt due to US influence. Month Day Year is increasing, apparently paralleling the common speech pattern.
Actually, we’re kind of confused about the whole issue. A lot of business systems use Month Day Year, no doubt for the ame reason that we put up with US-English spell checkers in inexpensive software that doesn’t have proper *Canadian *English spell checkers <snarl><mutter><grumble>. On the other hand, a lot of people use Day Month Year.
After checking various bits of paper and ID in my wallet, I find:
Driver’s Licence:
YYYY MM DD (separated by ‘bullets’, all numeric)
Commuter-train ticket (used):
DD MMM YY (spaces, month spelled out in 3-letter abbreviation)
validity and expiry dates on all credit cards:
MM/DD (numbers only, separated by slashes)
money-machine receipt from Royal Bank:
YYYYMMMDD (no spaces, month spelled in 3-L abbrev.)
money-machine receipt from CIBC:
MMMDD YY (month spelled in 3-L abbrev, one space before year)
money-machine receipt from TD Bank:
MMMDD/YY (no spaces, month spelled in 3-L abbrev, separated by slash from year)
money-machine receipt from Canada Trust:
YY/MM/DD (no spaces, two-digit year, all three separated by slashes)
[sup]And to think that TD Bank and Canada Trust are merging… :eek:[/sup]
Receipt from Shoppers Drug Mart:
Month DD, YYYY (month fully spelled out)
Receipt from Rogers Video:
NNNNNN (six numbers, no separators, and I can’t tell which is which because it says 010101… :eek: )
Receipt from Indigo Books:
NN/NN/YY (six numbers in three groups separated by slashes, and I can’t tell whether it’s DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY because it’s 12/10/00…)
(And today is 010203, according to how my copy of WS_FTP is datestamping the files it sends to the server…)
This is way too confusing, considering that today is 010203, or 2001-02-03, or 02-03-01, or Feb 03, 2001, 03 FEB 2001 or whatever, according to whichever system one randomly encounters. I can see how logging expenses would get to be a real pain…
Maybe the CRTC or someone should just decree that Canadians use one all-numeric format and stick to it!!!. I nominate YYYY-MM-DD.