Five provinces issue their own apostilles; everything else goes to Global Affairs Canada. The rule turns on where the document was issued, not where you live.
This is the question that costs people the most time, because the intuitive answer is wrong. The authority that apostilles your document is decided by where the document was issued, not by where you live or where you are standing when you send it.
Since Canada joined the Convention, five provinces act as their own competent authorities:
- Alberta, through the Ministry of Justice
- British Columbia, through the Order in Council Administration Office
- Ontario, through Official Documents Services
- Quebec, through the Ministère de la Justice
- Saskatchewan, through the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General
Everything else goes to Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa: documents from Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon, plus every federal document no matter which province you are in.
Federal documents are always federal
An RCMP police certificate, an immigration document, a federal incorporation: these go to Global Affairs Canada whether you live in Toronto, Calgary or Montreal. The province you are in makes no difference, because the signature being certified is a federal one.
Notarizing it locally does not move it
This is the trap. A document issued in Manitoba, brought to a Quebec notary and notarized here, is still a Manitoba document. The notarization adds a Quebec signature, but the underlying record was issued elsewhere, and it is the underlying record that decides. Filing it with the wrong authority means finding out after the queue rather than before it.
There is a related restriction worth knowing: British Columbia and Quebec will only apostille a notarized document if the original was issued in that province. That closes the obvious workaround before anyone tries it.
The timelines are not the same
Provincial authorities and Global Affairs Canada run separate queues with separate volumes, and those queues move at different speeds and change through the year. A file that goes entirely to one provincial authority is usually the quickest. One that goes to Ottawa depends on the federal backlog at that moment. We ask which authority applies before quoting a timeline, because quoting one without knowing is guessing.
Send the right version of the document
Authorities apostille an original or a properly certified copy, not a scan and not a photocopy nobody has attested. For civil-status records this usually means the long-form certificate rather than the wallet-sized short form, because the long form carries the registrar’s signature that the apostille certifies. Ordering the right form from the province that issued it is frequently the slowest single step, so it is worth starting first.
What this means for a file with several documents
A single request often contains documents from more than one province, and those parts genuinely travel separately. A degree from Ontario and a birth certificate from Nova Scotia go to two different authorities, come back on two different timelines, and only meet again when the file is assembled for the destination. Knowing that at the start is the difference between one realistic estimate and three surprises.