This article presents a portrait of two community-level and legal efforts in Canada to obtain official recognition of ASL and LSQ (Langue des signes quebecoise), both of which are recognized as official languages by the Canadian Association of the Deaf (CAD). In order to situate this issue in the Canadian linguistic context, the authors first present an overview of the legal framework of language policy and planning (LPP) for Canada's official languages. As Canada is officially a bilingual country, only federal institutions are subject to the Official Languages Act (e.g., Canadian Heritage), whereas questions related to the language of teaching are dealt with at the provincial level. Both cases that the authors discuss--Ontario and Quebec--are particularly interesting because they differ only in their formulation of the law on the language of teaching. Ontario is officially a bilingual province, whereas Quebec is officially monolingual and francophone, according to the Charter of the French Language (1977). Therefore the authors first discuss the different contexts of language policy surrounding both efforts to achieve recognition of ASL and LSQ within the same country. Then they present a demographic portrait of the distribution of the Canadian deaf population and of users of sign language. Finally, they discuss the two attempts to obtain recognition in terms of the impact of LPP on the bilingual teaching of deaf children. (Contains 1 table and 26 notes.)