Road signs in Canada
Road signs in Canada may conform to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Canada by the Transportation Association of Canada for use by Canadian jurisdictions. Although it serves a similar role to the MUTCD from the US Federal Highway Administration, it has been independently developed and has a number of key differences with its American counterpart, most notably the inclusion of bilingual signage for jurisdictions such as New Brunswick with significant francophone populations, as well as a heavier reliance on symbols rather than text legends.
Language
In Canada most of the road signs are written in English or French."All federal government-only signs and signs for highway use must be bilingual regardless of whether mandated by local, provincial or territorial language requirements," except for some places.
In Nunavut the four official languages must be used. Through Sea to Sky Highway one can see the places are labelled in Squamish names e.g. "K'emk'emeláy".
Stop sign
Under federal jurisdiction, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages has ruled the word stop to be an exclusively English term when used for stop signs. Accordingly, to comply with the Official Languages Act, only bilingual stop signs with both English and French are used on federally-regulated sites such as airports and entry points run by Canada Customs.Canada is the only country which uses arrêt instead of stop in the French-speaking world.
In Quebec, although all road signs must be in French legally, modern stop signs can be found with either arrêt or stop. Both words are considered valid French words by the Office québécois de la langue française, a stance held by the agency since 1927. In practice, however, it can be empirically observed that arrêt predominates in French-speaking areas, while stop can be found in majority English-speaking areas such as Montreal's West Island suburbs. At the time of the debates surrounding the adoption of the Charter of the French Language in 1977, the usage of stop on the older dual-word signs was considered to be English and therefore controversial; some signs were occasionally vandalised with red spray paint to turn the word stop into "101".