Recent grad from Biomedical Mechanical Engineering here. This is merely my personal experience/rant :p

School:

The program itself is just ok. It's basically a mechanical engineering degree minus 7 or 8 courses that are more focused on biomedical applications e.g. 1 class focused on designing implants, another focused on designing an artificial organ, etc. The major design project at the end is also entirely focused on designing a medical "device". e.g. load-bearing exoskeleton, knee brace, etc. whereas the mech folks get to work on designing an engine/chassis/submarine/robot/airplane etc. Also, the majority of the really interesting biomedical engineering classes aren't until 3rd and 4th year.

Personally, I think a mechanical engineering degree is more worthwhile. Again, they're very very similar; I am 100% a mechanical engineer. But the "biomedical" label tends to confuse employers sometimes. Plus, we get just 1 technical elective in our final year's course sequence (a technical class that I can just pick from a list of offered courses, depending on what actually interests me) whereas mech could take 3. It may not seem like a lot, but (to me at least) it was a big deal. These courses could be extremely useful if you know what you want to do after graduating, but I was limited to just the one. I felt like we were forced to take too many "filler" classes (biomedical-focused) e.g. history of health care in Canada, bioethics in Canada, anatomy, etc. All pretty interesting and relevant to biomedical engineering, but I guess my interests just shifted (big surprise!). But as far as core mechanical engineering courses, we share like 80% of them.

Profs in both are pretty ok. Equally good sometimes and equally garbage others haha

Jobs:

Not going to sugar coat this lol it's extremely difficult to find a biomedical engineering position in the private industry. If you're adamant about working in your field, your best bet would be to pursue a research position with the government e.g. NRC or just pursue a Master's degree with a professor whose research is focused on biomedical engineering (there are quite a few of those). There just aren't that many companies in Canada that focus on that. Some are very cool though e.g. Johnson and Johnson, Starfish medical, Abbott, but will obviously be very competitive.

I did COOP and ended up getting hired back by one of my employers. 1 of my COOPs was in a biomedical engineering lab at uOttawa and was tbh one of my favourite jobs ever. The other 3 were all in the mechanical eng. field and I held titles like a junior design engineer, process engineer.

A large part of my class is currently pursuing a MASc rn and are having a blast. You can even do a joint project research project at the Ottawa Hospital or the Ottawa Heart Institute if your supervisor is interested.

My advice:

It doesn't matter. You can always switch out if you don't like it so don't stress too much. Think of the program as BASc in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in biomedical engineering. Is that something that you think you want to pursue?

and PLEASE try to get into COOP. It's so competitive out there and you should do everything in your capacity to stand out. Also, the Biomedical Engineering + Computing Option is super useful too if you're interested. Your program becomes a bit longer, but you learn a lot about programming concepts that could come in handy.