alt Hacker NewsI'm not the best person to ask, but the last I heard, New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province. The rest are either French or English only. (It was a news story when the premier of Manitoba spoke in French in his legislature a few weeks back).
That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion. It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool. That's not to say that John Q. Public is going to be happy if you are going to talk to him in French, but I think with the explosion of other languages in Alberta, the regressive types now are probably more accepting of it than they were before.
(Again this is just my observation, N=1, etc..)
> That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion.
Not really true, there is usually a very limited number of seats in french immersion. In the school district where I live, its a lottery system of who gets to go into french immersion as there are limited seats. Also you're implying that parents are not doing a good job if they don't send their kids to french immersion which is patently false.
> It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool
In certain positions in the federal government, possibly. I know lots of people who work in provincial governments that don't know any french, and have never been required to know any.