June 13, 1986 - Henry Vlug

Human Rights a Day

Henry Vlug called to the bar, becoming Canada’s first deaf lawyer. Henry Vlug was born in 1944 in Nieuwer Amstel, Netherlands. He moved to Powell River, B.C. in 1952. He became deaf just before grade two, and after public and private schools, graduated from the Jericho Hill School for the Deaf in Vancouver. His post-secondary education led him to a teaching career for ten years before he pursued law school at the University of British Columbia in 1982. After articling, on June 13, 1986, Vlug was called to the bar in British Columbia, becoming Canada’s first deaf lawyer. He opened his own practice. In October 1995, he found himself watching the fifth in a series of baseball games on television. The program had no captioning, even though captioning had been offered for the previous four games. Vlug began noticing other gaps in captioning by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), so he complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. In November 2000, this resulted in the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ordering the CBC to pay Vlug $10,000 and to caption all its television programming. On another front, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1997 the B.C. government had to provide sign language interpreters for deaf persons in many medical procedures, Vlug was involved in the planning and strategy. On July 15, 2000, Vlug was awarded both the Arthur Hazlitt Citizenship Award and the Canadian Association of the Deaf (CAD) Hall of Fame in recognition of his outstanding contributions to deaf people and the CAD. In 2004 Vlug became the first deaf lawyer in the world to be made a Q.C., being appointed the prestigious Queen’s Counsel designation by the Canadian Bar Association.