The Historic Making of Video Relay Service (VRS) in Canada


As there will be VRS grand opening next week in Canada, it is exciting time for everyone in Deaf community! It is a history in the making! Without Deaf community, VRS would not be happening—and Deaf people has been working very hard to get it happening. Why? They believe in social justice fighting for their equality rights—virtually all languages are affected by politics and government. Politics is the process of making collective decisions in a community, society, or group through the application of influence and power. Since the general population was not aware about it at all—the general population: Deaf community. Government is the persons or organizations that make, enforce, and implement political decisions for a society.

It takes a community, for one, VRS to make the first approach to study political life what Deaf people look for. They normally think about political life from a particular ideology, a more or less coherent system of political thinking. Yet, why did VRS did not inform Deaf community that it would launch next week? Since Deaf community was not informed or let Deaf Canadians show their support is hard to fathom, the question, did VRS understand fully what successful American Sign Language-English interpreters and executives, like successful cross-linguistic, cross-cultural interpreters, are competent users of both signed and spoken (and supposedly written, since English is reduced into a written form) languages?

As VRS interpreters are the students of ASL, they need to observe more and should not reject Deaf people’s involvement—that is a big red flag since it is all about observing cross-linguistic and cross behavior even activities, too which means—to INFORM all of Deaf Canadians—not to keep them in the dark.

Yes, it is a historic moment—and they use VRS to record what they observe, to explain what they record, and to defend what they explain. ASL interpreters—they write to take part in discussing step by step approximations of a linguistic solution to a single problem, that of understanding both signed and spoken (and written) languages at the level of such production as prose or narrative, whether literacy or sociological—keeping Deaf community out of the picture for the VRS launch—they should not deserve some kind of discipline that must be learned as early a stage as possible out to their “power-playing” in VRS industry.

“VIP” for VRS executives and whoever the people are do not have the privileges to let Deaf community know about it. They are morally wrong. Whoever the person in Ottawa who is responsible for withholding the information is wrong.

The making of VRS in Canada is designed to help Deaf community: Informing the interpreters about what linguistics of ASL are all about. Intended for both first-time and experienced ASL interpreters, the grand opening offers a basic historical orientation and a challenging account of current ASL issues and analytical linguistics. The manual focuses on linguistic research and describes the research process in detail, explaining how Deaf community can maintain self-confidence once they use VRS for the first time. It is a crucial responsibility of VRS to use inform Deaf community ethically.

After all, this historic moment, VRS in Canada is still in the making…….


Copyright © 2016 Jason Tozier



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