When I joined the government, most competitions were "bilingual non-imperative". This meant that both bilingual and unilingual folk were able to apply on competitions for bilingual positions. So in my case, I was a programmer wanting to be a project leader. Project leader means supervising programmers, meaning I needed to be bilingual since my team members could be anglophone or francophone. But the "non-imperative" part meant that I would be trained, at government expense, to be bilingual. I took part time classes for 2 years and full time immersion for 4 months.
However, in 2006 there was a new Official Languages Exclusion Order which mandated that most competitions be imperative. Meaning that the person MUST be bilingual BEFORE applying on the competition. In general, the government is supposed to be supportive in an employee's wish to become bilingual and any anglophone wishing to move ahead should be applying for language training. However, in practice, what this has meant is that mostly francophones are applying on competitions. They grow up watching a mix of french and english TV. There are far more TV, radio, print media in english than in french... so while it is easy for an anglophone to avoid french media, it is more difficult for a francophone to avoid english media. So they are, for the most part, and particularly in Gatineau, bilingual.
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