I've been living in Quebec a long time, and the language thing is far more profound than most outside appreciate. It really does function as a de facto barrier for anything they want to use it for, and fairly effectively. In that sense living here can be a bit like being in a time warp.

One factor is that there are just enough smart monolingual francophones that they cannot really effectively leave, which means that the brain drain effect, while present, is nothing like as extreme as in the rest of Canada.