We all know that instant start and rapid start lamps don't start well in cold weather so was wondering what sort of fluorescents do they use in Alaska and Canada? I've watched ice road truckers and the garages and other buildings are lit with fluorescents.

Preheat with electronic or thermal starters, are the best choice for cold weather, as they preheats the cathodes correctly, and then provides a high voltage spike to start the lamp. IS and RS have both much lower OCV than the voltage produced by the starter.

That would make sense I don't think there would be any other way round it you confirmed what I thought

Special IS or RS (with increased OCV compare to standard ballasts) would do the job to ignite the lamps, then the rest (to reach reasonable efficacy) lies on the fixture thermal insulation...
Of course the hot cathode selectivity for the RS ballasts will be gone, but that does not matter when the lamps are not frequently switched, rather small cost to pay.

With air thermal starters you will have problems: at cold they won't open at all. Or even when temperature compensated, the compensation won't work well at such low temperatures.

Electronic would do the job, as they have no problem supplying kV and on top of that at high frequency. But there would be problems with the electrolytic capacitors (their ESR will increase a lot before they warm up), but the design could count with that. Fortunately that means just extra power dissipation there, but that will heat them up even quicker. Just the rest of the design should handle the related increased ripple.

All that with the wide temperature range lamp types.

Or one crude, desperate way to help: Install a heater into the fixture, with a thermostat set to the minimum operating temperature of the lamps. Plus a relay, which delays the power to the ballast until the internal temperature reaches the set limit. It delays the light switch ON, but in such conditions you should be happy it just starts...
(this idea came from Russia - when the proper lamp types was not available)

Im not sure if this kind of lamps are available in 120V gears but in Finland (where its also pretty cold in winter) we use this kind of thermo fluorescent lamps in low temp installations: http://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-43307

Ive also heard that there are separated jackets available that could be used with regular fluorescent lamps. These thermo lamps work quite well.

The thermo jacket is just a form of thermal insulation. So you have still to ignite the lamp in the first place. And that uses to be quite problematic...
The 230V series choke is rather small and so has limited parasitics, so can deliver really high voltage pulses for starting. But the same could not be said for the 120V autotransformer ballasts. There the parasitics (mainly eddy currents) are way more dominant and really do limit the voltage available for the ignition.
And not speaking about the fact the preheat ballasts for the higher voltage lamps (those requiring the step up transformer functionality) are virtually an extinct specie in the 120V areas...

In my part of Canada (usually the coldest nights are -20ºC) outdoor fixtures normally used HO or VHO lamps and ballasts. If maintaining a suitable arc is problematic, the lamps can be jacketed or the entire fitting enclosed in a weathertight enclosure. Most of these fittings work quite well despite the cold. Nowadays, the modern instant-start F32T8 ballast and lamp are used, with only the usual electronic ballast problems.

I have two F15T8 fixtures in my basement outdoor entrance (uninsulated, usually the same temperature like outdoors) and the preheat chokes have no problem igniting the lamps although they are quite dim until warmup.

I live in southeast Alaska and here standard F40T12/F34T12 are JUST okay with our winters, though they need warmup time.  60w energy saver F96T12 slimlines are pretty horrible here, though.

Interesting stuff looks like there is a mixture of technologies I think that in very cold places it would be better to leave them on 24/7. I'm struggling with our winter never mind a -40F winter lol

Most garages I've seen are just lit with common 4 foot T12s or 8 foot T12 slimlines, though F32T8s or T5s are becoming more common.  Some shops use HIDs inside.  HID wallpacks, NEMAs or security lights dominate outdoor area lighting, though it can get cold enough that mercury vapor lamps have a hard time striking.  Outdoor fluorescents maybe in enclosed fixtures, open fluorescents with sleeves or just open tubes.  They can get dim when it gets cold though.  Sign fluorescents tend to do better, but even they get dim when cold.  I was surprised to find HID signs are more common than I first thought.  Neon signs don't seem to mind the cold.

I've also put external tube guards on them so any air movement doesn't bother them as much, even inside external signs, and if they use any thing that is not a HO or VHO ballasts and they don't want to replace them, a thin strip of copper tape down the tube connected to a ground wire helps, its not perfect but its a quick low cost trick to get them to start when it's stupid cold outside..

And most garages have heaters in them, if you ever have the joy of picking up say a 3/4 inch wrench on a day when its -40 out you'll buy a heater pretty quick, -40 weather is not the same as putting a wrench in the freezer it's not even close, even if you have gloves on try working with it for an hour your fingers start hurting and when they stop hurting that is when real problems like frostbite start, you can really lose fingers, but you can find kerosene/propane heaters in just about every hardware store in Canada it's also not hard to find big units either like 250,000 Btu or even 1,000,000 btu and larger, so even large shops are easy to heat...During filming they more then likely warm the place up and then turn them off because they are noisy machines, some shops also use overhead IR heaters so you might not notice them, they just look like a black pipe with a silver reflector going across the ceiling, or they might even have in-floor heating the concrete slab... 

I think the workshops were heated because the mechanics there were able to restart the trucks easily enough when they were outside on the road the engines were run 24/7. I remember in my uncles garage he had a big heater it was powered by paraffin and in the mid winter everyone wanted to be near it!