Divorce certificates are one of the most common documents we retrieve for people living outside Canada, and the reason is almost always the same: someone wants to remarry, and the registrar in their country wants apostilled proof that the previous marriage actually ended.
The route is not complicated. It is just built entirely around the assumption that you are standing in Ontario, and every step quietly breaks when you are not.
First: the PDF problem
Ontario now issues a good deal of court output digitally, and people reasonably assume the PDF in their inbox is the document. For most purposes it is.
For an apostille it is not. Official Documents Services authenticates a physical seal and a registrar's signature. A printout of an emailed PDF carries neither, so there is nothing for ODS to verify. This is not a judgement about whether your PDF is genuine — it is that the entire mechanism of an apostille is signature verification, and a laser-printed image is not a signature.
So step one is always the same: obtain a paper Certificate of Divorce, Form 36B, from the courthouse.
Which courthouse, and what if you don't know
The certificate comes from the Superior Court of Justice location where the divorce application was started. Not from a provincial vital statistics office, not from Ottawa, not from any central body. The file lives where it was opened.
If you have moved countries since, lost the paperwork, and no longer remember which courthouse handled it, that is common and usually solvable. The federal Central Registry of Divorce Proceedings can help identify the court. Be clear about its limits, though: it will not give you your court file number, and it cannot issue the certificate. It points you at the right building. Everything after that happens at the courthouse.
For older files, records may have moved to the Archives of Ontario, which adds time.
One timing point worth knowing: a divorce takes effect on the thirty-first day after the judge signs the order, and the certificate cannot issue before then. If your divorce is recent, check that date before you start.
The three walls that appear when you are abroad
The Ontario process itself is straightforward. Doing it from another country is where it breaks, and it breaks in three specific places.
The court takes money orders or certified cheques for mail-in requests. Payable to the Minister of Finance. Personal cheques are refused. If you are in Bucharest, Dubai or São Paulo, obtaining a Canadian money order is somewhere between difficult and impossible. There is an online request route that accepts cards, but delivery still has to land somewhere.
Delivery has to land at a Canadian address. This is the wall that stops most people. Even where a court will consider mailing further afield, it goes by ordinary untracked post — and this is a document you cannot casually replace.
A third party needs written authorization. The court will not release your divorce certificate to someone else without a signed letter naming them. In practice that letter needs the court file number, your full name and date of birth exactly as they appear in the file, the name of the other party to the divorce, the purpose of the request, an explicit statement authorizing that person to request and receive the certificate, and your signature and date. Wording that does not match what the office expects comes back weeks later, unprocessed.
The mistake that costs a month
Here is the one that genuinely hurts, and we see it regularly.
Someone manages to get the certificate mailed to them abroad. It arrives. They present it to the foreign registrar, who says it needs an apostille. And now the document has to go back to Canada, be apostilled, and come out again.
That is two extra international legs, easily a month of delay, and two more chances for an irreplaceable original to go missing in transit.
The certificate should never leave Canada unauthenticated. It goes from the courthouse to the apostille authority while still inside the country, and it crosses the ocean exactly once, finished.
What Ontario charges, and how long it takes
As of August 2026:
- $25 for the Certificate of Divorce
- $32 for the Ontario apostille on a court document — court and government documents sit at the higher of the two ODS rates; the $16 rate applies to notarized documents
Timelines, and these are the published ones rather than optimistic ones:
- Court documents can take up to 10 business days, even for an in-person request
- ODS mail-in apostille requests run up to 15 business days from receipt, not counting transit
- International shipping sits on top of both
Realistically, six to seven weeks door to door for a clean file. We quote with margin deliberately, because government offices adjust processing times without notice and we would rather build in the slack than promise a date nobody controls.
Both documents travel by tracked mail, twice
The certificate makes two domestic journeys — courthouse to us, then us to ODS and back. Both the court and ODS return documents by ordinary mail unless a prepaid tracked envelope is enclosed.
Enclosing tracked return envelopes at both stages costs more than letting it ride in regular post. On a document that takes six weeks and a court order to replace, that is not a saving worth making.
No notary is involved
A small point that saves people money and confusion: Ontario court documents go straight to Official Documents Services. They do not need to be notarized first, and a notary cannot issue an apostille in any case.
The $16 ODS rate that appears in a lot of online guidance is for notarized documents. A Certificate of Divorce is a court document. Anyone quoting you a notary fee on this file is adding a step that does not exist.
After the apostille
If your destination is a member of the Hague Apostille Convention — which covers most of Europe, including Romania since 2001 — one apostille is enough. There is no embassy or consular step.
The receiving authority will often want a translation, and that is done after the apostille, by a translator they recognise. The apostille itself does not usually need translating. Their translation rules are theirs; get them in writing from the office that will accept the document rather than assuming.
If your destination is not a Convention member, the route is different: authentication followed by consular legalization. Check your country before you start.
The order that works
- Confirm the courthouse and the court file number
- Confirm the divorce is in effect and the certificate can issue
- Sign the authorization letter, with the identifiers that court expects
- Request the paper Certificate of Divorce, delivered to a Canadian address, with a tracked return envelope
- Submit the certified original to Official Documents Services with the fee
- Ship the finished apostilled document abroad, once, tracked
- Arrange translation locally if the receiving authority requires it
Where we come in
If you have nobody in Canada, steps 3 through 6 are the ones that are not merely inconvenient but structurally impossible from a foreign address. We act as the Canadian address and the authorized requester: we draft the authorization for your signature, buy and send the money order, receive the certified original, submit it to ODS, and ship the finished document to you once.
Third-party costs are billed at cost with receipts, quoted separately from our fee, and our fee is paid at the end — once the apostilled certificate is in our hands and ready to ship, not before. The details are on our document retrieval page, and the free pre-check confirms the routing and cost before anything is ordered.
Verified August 2026. Court fees, apostille fees and processing times are set by the Ontario government and change without notice. Viapostille is not a law firm and does not give legal advice; confirm requirements with the court and with the authority that will receive your document.
Lire cet article en français : Faire apostiller un certificat de divorce ontarien depuis l'étranger