The language situation in Canada is very interesting. My impression is that for many, they just either hate the other language and anything related to it, or at best don't care about it. This is also what is on-going in other countries (that I know) with several official languages. I think here about Belgium.
I believe this two-language situation should be used instead as a strength, but it is rarely the case.
everyone thinks about that...it is crazy. It is part of the government's fault as well. For example I was living in New Brunswick, it is the only officially bilingual province. It should be paradise right? But no. You have two health authorities (francophone and one anglophone), the anglophone schools have what they call French Immersion, but it looks like it isn 't enough to transform kids into bilinguals in most cases. So Lots of jobs requires you to be bilingual and the anglophones gets some anger about that and they hate francophones. In the other hand, the francophones there feel also the pressure to learn English , and even if they know English, they prefer to talk in French; I heard people suing nurses in the hospital because they didn't talk in french with them. It is a crazy situation like you mentioned...
This really sounds like Belgium (in which I have spent more than 20 years of my life :D ).