Canada is a country with a complex linguistic and cultural landscape characterized by two official languages (English and French), a steady influx of immigrants, and a number of aboriginal communities. Within this rich local context, and in a broader global environment where bilingualism and multilingualism are increasingly recognized as a norm rather than an exception, I review language background profiling practices at publicly funded Canadian elementary schools. A sample of 96 school intake/registration forms was collected from school boards in Canada's three largest English-speaking provinces: Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. An analysis of the data indicates a high degree of variability in terms of the number, type and combination patterns of the language background questions asked. While school boards recognize various aspects of sequential bilingualism and multilingualism, most registration forms do not allow explicitly for the possibility of a child having more than one first/native language (simultaneous bilingualism). A discussion of what I call chronological-nativist (i.e. focused on the notion of a person's first/native/mother language) and synchronic-functional (i.e. focused on a person's current language abilities) approaches to language profiling provides further insights into some underlying assumptions held by provincial educational systems with regard to monolingual, bilingual and multilingual norms.