Of every document we handle, the RCMP certified criminal record check is the one people most often start too late and most often route wrongly. It is also the one where being outside Canada creates the most links in the chain.
There are five. Fingerprints taken where you live. An RCMP-accredited company in Canada that digitizes and submits them. The RCMP itself. Global Affairs Canada for the apostille. One shipment back out to you. Every link needs a physical Canadian address at some point, and that is the constraint that shapes the whole file.
First: make sure it is this check
Before anything else, confirm what the receiving authority actually asked for. There are three different things called a "police check" in Canada and they are not interchangeable.
The RCMP certified criminal record check is fingerprint-based, issued by the RCMP's national repository in Ottawa, and is the only one that reliably satisfies foreign visa, residency and licensing requirements. It is a federal document.
A name-based police check from a municipal service compares your name and date of birth against a database. It is fast and cheap and it is refused by most consulates. Spain's non-lucrative visa posts, for example, state explicitly that local or municipal police certificates are not accepted.
A vulnerable sector check is a different product again, available only through your local police service, not through accredited companies, and rarely what a foreign authority wants.
Get the requirement in writing from the office that will receive the document. This one question decides whether the next three months are useful or wasted.
Step 1 · Fingerprints, taken where you live
Electronic capture is not available outside Canada. Your prints have to be taken the traditional way, ink and roll, on a physical card.
Where you can have that done depends on your country, and typically includes a local police station, a government-approved biometric or forensic agency, or a private fingerprinting service authorized to take prints. Some countries' own embassies and consulates offer it. Canadian embassies and consulates generally do not, and in any case they cannot apostille anything either.
The card matters. The RCMP's own form C-216C is the safest choice. The US FD-258 card and standard police fingerprint cards from other countries are commonly accepted, provided they carry a full set of rolled and flat impressions and the standard identifying fields. Confirm with your accredited agency in Canada before your appointment, not after.
Whoever takes the prints must sign and stamp the card. If the agency cannot provide an official stamp, a short notarized statement confirming the prints were taken legitimately usually solves it.
One smudged or incomplete impression means rejection, and rejection means starting the international courier leg again. It is worth asking the technician to check the card before you leave.
Step 2 · Identity documents and consent
Prepare, at the same appointment:
- Two pieces of valid government-issued identification, at least one with a photograph, and photocopies of both
- A recent passport-size photograph, where the agency asks for one
- The agency's application and consent forms, signed. Some require a witness
- A third-party release, if the result is to be delivered to anyone other than you
Expired identification stops the file before it leaves your hands. So does a name on the fingerprint card that does not match your passport exactly, which is one of the most common causes of downstream refusal by a foreign consulate even after the RCMP issues cleanly.
Step 3 · Courier the originals to Canada
The RCMP accepts civil fingerprint submissions only from accredited companies. Not from individuals, not from foreign police services, not from a scanned copy you email. This is not a preference; it is the rule the whole process rests on.
So the original signed and stamped card, the identity copies and the signed forms go by tracked courier to an RCMP-accredited company in Canada. That company digitizes the prints and transmits them to the RCMP's Canadian Criminal Real Time Identification Services.
Pick the accredited company deliberately. Several serve only walk-in customers in their own city and are not set up for out-of-country files. The ones that are will publish an out-of-country package telling you exactly which card they accept, which forms to sign, and the point that matters most: where the RCMP result should be mailed.
Step 4 · RCMP processing, which nobody can accelerate
Published processing runs from a few days to about 120 days, depending on whether your prints raise a possible match requiring manual verification. A clean set with no match is usually fast. A common surname and a possible hit can take months.
No company, ours included, has any influence over this timeline. Anyone quoting you a guaranteed RCMP date is quoting something they do not control.
Mailing time is on top, and the result is issued on paper. There is no digital version that can substitute, because the next step needs a physical signature to verify.
Step 5 · The mistake that adds six weeks
Here is the one that genuinely costs people, and we see it constantly.
The RCMP will mail the result to an international address, by ordinary airmail, at no extra cost. That sounds like a convenience. It is usually a trap.
The certificate that lands in your mailbox in Bogotá or Manila or Asunción has no apostille on it. You present it, the consulate says it needs one, and now an irreplaceable original has to travel back to Canada, be apostilled, and come out again. Two extra international legs, roughly a month, and two more chances to lose it in transit, on a document that took you three months to obtain.
The certificate should never leave Canada unauthenticated. Give the accredited agency a Canadian delivery address, so the result goes from the RCMP straight to the apostille authority while still inside the country, and crosses the ocean exactly once, finished.
This is the single most valuable decision on the whole file, and it is made at Step 3, before your prints are even taken.
Step 6 · The apostille, at Global Affairs Canada
The RCMP check is a federal document, so it goes to Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa. Always. No provincial authority can touch it: not Québec, not Ontario, not the province you last lived in. If you are unsure how Canada's six authorities divide the work, who can apostille a document in Canada sets out the whole map.
Three things to know about this step:
- The apostille is free. Global Affairs Canada charges nothing.
- It runs about 20 business days, plus mail in both directions.
- There is no expedited service, at any price. Mail-in submission only, no counter, no rush fee. Government processing speed cannot be bought, and anyone selling it to you is selling something that is not theirs.
Return is by ordinary mail unless a prepaid tracked label and a suitable unfolded envelope are enclosed. On a document with a three-month chain behind it, that is not a saving worth making.
Full detail on this authority is on our federal and other provinces page and the RCMP criminal record check page.
If your destination is not a Hague member
The route changes. Global Affairs Canada issues an authentication instead of an apostille, and the document then goes to that country's embassy or consulate in Canada for legalization, with its own fee and its own queue.
The two routes are not interchangeable and the wrong one means starting over. Confirm your destination's status before the fingerprints are taken, not after the certificate arrives.
The validity clock, and why sequencing beats speed
Most consulates want a criminal record check issued within the last three or six months, and some count that window from the date of issue rather than the date of the apostille.
This is why the RCMP check is almost always the document you start first, not last. It has the longest and least predictable processing of anything in a typical visa file, and it is the one with an expiry attached. A medical certificate or a birth certificate can be obtained in weeks; this cannot.
Where a whole file is involved, such as a retirement visa, a residency application or a work permit, our guides to apostilles for immigration abroad and the real timelines from abroad cover how the documents should be staggered so nothing expires while something else is still in a queue.
Translation comes at the very end. Translate after the apostille, not before, by a translator the receiving country recognises.
The order that works
- Confirm in writing that the receiving authority wants the RCMP certified, fingerprint-based check
- Confirm whether your destination is a Hague member, which decides apostille or authentication plus legalization
- Choose an RCMP-accredited company in Canada that handles out-of-country files, and get its package
- Have ink-and-roll prints taken locally on the accepted card, signed and stamped, with the name exactly as on your passport
- Courier the originals, identity copies and signed forms to the accredited company, tracked
- Direct the RCMP result to a Canadian address, never to your address abroad
- Submit the certificate to Global Affairs Canada with a prepaid tracked return label
- Ship the finished apostilled document to you once, tracked
- Arrange translation locally if required
Where we come in
We act as the Canadian address for steps 6 through 8, and as the coordinator for the rest.
A file we handled recently is typical of the pattern. A couple living in South America needed two Canadian birth certificates and two RCMP checks, all apostilled, for a residency application. The birth certificates had to be ordered by them personally, because a vital statistics office releases a certificate only to the person named on it, and we said so rather than offering to do something we could not. What we did do was give them our office as the delivery address on both applications, so four documents from two different authorities landed in one place in Canada. The prints were taken locally in their city and couriered to the accredited agency. The RCMP results came to us. The federal apostilles were applied here. Everything left Canada in a single consolidated courier shipment instead of four.
That is the shape of the value: not speed, which nobody controls, but removing the international legs, the wrong-authority returns and the four separate shipments. Third-party costs (courier, agency fees, the birth certificates) are billed at cost with receipts, quoted separately from our fee, and our fee is paid at the end, once the apostilled documents are in our hands and ready to ship.
The free pre-check confirms the routing, the document type and the full cost before anything is ordered, and apostille from abroad explains how the remote process works end to end.
Verified September 2026. Processing times and requirements are set by the RCMP and Global Affairs Canada and change without notice. Viapostille is not a law firm, is not an RCMP-accredited fingerprinting company, and does not give legal advice; confirm requirements with the authority that will receive your document.
Lire cet article en français : Faire apostiller un casier judiciaire de la GRC depuis l'étranger