This article explores the link between discourse and policy using a discursive web metaphor. It develops the notion of policy as a discursive web based on a post-positivist framework that recognises the way multiple discourses from multiple voices interact in a complex web of power relationships to influence reality. Using Ontario's Access to Professions and Trades as the policy example, it demonstrates how globalisation and neo-liberalism facilitate a "brain drain" discourse, which in the Canadian, and specifically Ontario, context evolved into a "skills shortage" discursive web. Deconstructing the discourses in this web, I expose how their interactions facilitate policy solutions such as assessment or training while constraining others. (Contains 6 notes.)