Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.

This article examines developments in the field of policy studies in order to consider their applicability for the study of language policy and planning. In particular, Foucauldian insights into power and discourse offer the possibility of elaborating on descriptive language policy studies and force a reconsideration of the premise upon which policymaking is often based: the starting point of the “problem” for which a policy solution is needed. By analyzing the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-70) in order to trace the development of Canada’s Official Languages Act (1969), this paper advocates for a broader set of theoretical and methodological approaches to our work as scholars in the field of language policy.