Mudcat, the part of Canada you were in is very French. About half of New Brunswick and almost all of Quebec have a French speaking majority. Quebec is the worst though. They have actually made it illegal to post the name of a business in English unless the French Lettering is twice the size or some dumb crap like that. It doesn't matter that the vast majority of the country english only. Oh yeah, and all of the road signs in Quebec are french only. Imagine driving in LA and all of the signs are in Spanish. It is a real pain in the butt. We had friends from the States trying to meet us in Montreal, but they couldn't find out how to get downtown because no signs are in English. Centerville is the sign for downtown in Quebec.
I was born in the US so sadly for me I missed the first few years of French indoctrination the kids here have to go through. Don't get me wrong, Quebec rocks, no one can party like like those guys. The drinking age is 18 for gods sake.
Also if you notice us Canucks using the letter U in a lot of our words and you think we're not spelling correctly it's because that's how it's spelled up here. I try to drop the extra U but sometimes it slips past.
What the heck was my point again.... Oh yeah, we don't have subtitles on our movies up here unless we turn them on in the DVD menu. It is the law that French subtitles have to be available on the DVDs though. They do run french titles at movie theaters in Quebec, or even worse they dub the voices. At least they did when I last went to a movie there, but that was about 9 years ago.