This paper uses critical policy analysis to investigate how the concept of equity has been co-opted to promote a neoliberal agenda in education reforms in Manitoba. Early provincial reform documents contained a narrow definition of equity focused primarily on closing achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. These reform…

Internationalization at a distance (IaD) has been loosely defined as distance education across borders or the international mobility of knowledge without human mobility. It is largely celebrated, for example, for its potential to improve global education access and mitigate environmental harm. However, this depoliticized positioning risks…

Students who have been labeled as having "behaviour problems" in the school system have some of the worst academic and social outcomes of any student group. In most Canadian provinces, responses to students who misbehave are legislated through Safe Schools policies intended to guide districts and individual schools in responding to…

Education reform efforts stemming from the Programme in International Student Achievement have strengthened in recent years, particularly in response to the growth of global references societies -- high achieving educational jurisdictions such as Finland, Hong Kong-China, and more recently Estonia and Singapore. Despite political rhetoric,…

In Ontario, Canada, principals' work is guided by competencies outlined in the Ontario Leadership Framework which reflect the leadership skills and behaviours needed to successfully lead schools, improve student achievement and well-being. The problem is that this document largely ignores equity and anti-oppressive leadership behaviours. The…

In late 2020 the Government of Alberta's Ministry of Advanced Education sent a guidance document to Alberta post-secondary institutions to lay out how work-integrated learning was to be conducted. This document also informed the institutions that work-integrated learning should be included in all future program proposals. The guidelines were sent…

In 2015, the Government of British Columbia (BC), Canada, reversed a long-standing mandate to provide tuition-free Adult Basic Education (ABE) to all adults. Drawing upon internal government policy documents and inter- and intra-ministerial communications obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) tools, key policy documents, social media…

Using the ethics of care as a theoretical lens, alongside the techniques of discourse analysis, I critically analyze texts from Alberta's Inspiring Education policies. On the basis of this analysis, I identify two discourses: the sentimental treatment of care and the "facilitator discourse." I argue that a caring teacher-student…

Building on the recent studies revealing that official bilingualism policies in Canada are often used to reinforce a specific racial and linguistic order, this paper addresses the impact of these federal-level policies on education policies at the provincial level. From the policy genealogy perspective, we examine Ontario's Heritage Languages…

In Canada's first-ever strategy, international education (IE) is linked to immigration policy with international students (IS) recruited as "ideal" immigrants. This paper engages in policy sociology and Ball's concepts of "policy as text" and "policy as discourse" (10). It follows three stages of critical policy…

Fundraising and collecting fees are ubiquitous in Ontario, Canada's public schools. Critics assert that these practices perpetuate and exacerbate inequities between schools and communities. In this article we present findings from a critical policy analysis of an advocacy group's efforts to change Ontario's fees and fundraising policies over the…

As the prevalence and negative effects of bullying become widely known, people around the world seem desperate to solve the bullying "problem". A sizeable body of research about many aspects of bullying and a plethora of anti-bullying programmes and policies now exist. This critical policy analysis asks: how does Ontario, Canada's…

In this article the authors explore a Canadian example of how the language of innovation reproduces discourses of neoliberalism in postsecondary education policy documents. How innovation is defined and used in postsecondary education is explored through the analysis of international and regional policy documents. Through their research they ask…

Rhetorical analysis, an approach to critical discourse analysis, is presented as a useful method for critical policy analysis and its effort to understand the role policies play in perpetuating inequality. A rhetorical analysis of Character "Matters!", the character education policy of a school board in Ontario, Canada, provides an…

In this paper, we demonstrate how history informs how policy meanings are constructed and the rhetorical strategies used to convince others to accept these meanings. We have two goals: (a) to show how a group of non-governmental actors, People for Education, became part of Ontario, Canada's policy discursive network; and (b) to demonstrate the…