Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada (AVLIC)

5.2.1 Members shall not by any means engage in, nor allow the use of, statements that are false, misleading, incomplete, or likely to mislead consumers or members of the public.

I presume none of these interpreters presented themselves as "certified", but they should have corrected the record when Linda Clarke in a CBC interview said:

LC:            But you see we certainly do have the qualified interpreters.  If these interpreters were not qualified they would not be certified by the national and international body of interpreters.  Educational interpreter is a different interpreter.  We don’t have those, I don’t know of very many educational interpreters in the entire country, so to have them in this province.  But the interpreters that we have, two for example, ok I’ll give you one.  One has more than 30 years experience as a teacher of the Deaf at the Newfoundland School for the Deaf, she has deafness in her family, she has done an interpreter training program, she’s very qualified.  Another person has deafness in her family and is AVLIC, which is the Canadian national association for certifying body.  The other three interpreters that we have, the other two at Gonzaga and one at MacDonald Drive, are all certified with AVLIC or RID.  So in my mind they are extremely qualified and the students are highly, highly, highly …what…they think the interpreting is great.  Now if the interpreting, if the students didn’t we would know (CBC interrupts)…

CBC:            But why do we keep hearing from parents, on our station and others, saying that is not the case?

LC:            What, the parents are saying what?

CBC:            That the supports aren’t there, that there are interpreters that have got a lot of schools to cover they can’t spend the time with the individual students that they want, that some of them aren’t fully fluent in American Sign Language.  They say that it is not as fully supportive as the picture you paint.

LC:            Well I don’t know of any parents that are saying that about the interpreters, to tell you the truth.  I don’t know of any parents that have said anything about interpreters not being available.  Now, um if you’re talking about a student…okay I’ll go back to it.  There would be, come September, four students left in our dormitory.  I was on the road talking to these four parents, last week.  And they were given a number of choices.  The students could come back to Gonzaga and finish their high school program and we would fine alternate living arrangements.  Given that we have 90 000 square feet of school and to have four students there doesn’t seem reasonable.  Or the other option was that they could stay home with an interpreter and also a trained teacher of the deaf.  Now it would be up to the parents which option that choose.  But it wasn’t like they were given the option of your child must stay home, go to your neighborhood school with an interpreter and teacher.  That was just one option of two.  The other one was alternate living arrangements.  I have not been talking to any parents or have heard from any parent that has said the interpreters were not in place for their children.  Now we do not use interpreters for junior or elementary students.  The research shows that they do not have the language to use an interpreter.  But with high school students yes.  And as I said we have four at Gonzaga and one at MacDonald Drive and they are all fully trained and certified by national bodies.

In any event, it's clear that AVLIC communicated with the Department of Education in December 2009 warning them about the dangers of using "unqualified interpreters" in education.