Quebec Notarial Compliance

Effective date: May 28, 2026 Last updated: October 5, 2026

This page explains how Certivant supports Quebec notaries who perform remote notarial acts ("actes notariés à distance") under the Loi sur le notariat (CQLR c. N-3) and the Loi concernant le cadre juridique des technologies de l'information (CQLR c. C-1.1, commonly "LCJTI"). It is written for the notary evaluating Certivant, the firm-level compliance officer reviewing a potential subscription, and the Chambre des notaires du Québec ("CNQ") inspector reviewing a notary's technology stack during accreditation or audit.

A French-language version of this page is queued for our next translation pass and will appear at /fr/legal/quebec-notarial-compliance alongside this English original. Until then, please email compliance@certivant.com if you need a translated extract for a CNQ filing.

Introduction

A remote notarial act is a notarial act received at a distance using a technological means that allows the notary to identify each party, to confirm their consent, and to capture the act in a form that has the same legal value as a paper original. The legal framework that authorises and regulates this practice in Quebec combines the Loi sur le notariat (articles 10 and 11 on the notary's identification and the verification of applicant identity; articles 43, 46, 47, 49, 50 and 51 on the conduct and certification of the act) and the LCJTI (article 25 on cryptographic safeguards, article 27 on access logs, and the provisions governing electronic signatures). The full statutory text is published by the Éditeur officiel du Québec at legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca.

Certivant is a tool the notary uses to satisfy specific, technically demanding parts of those requirements — identity verification, synchronous video presence, audit logging, signed certification, cryptographic safeguards. The notary remains the regulated professional and the legally responsible party for the act. Certivant does not replace the notary's professional judgement, does not establish the notary–client relationship, does not draft the underlying act, and does not maintain the notarial dossier ("greffe"). What Certivant provides is a controlled, auditable environment in which the notary performs the identity-verification and live-presence portions of the act, plus a tamper-evident certificate the notary attaches to the dossier as evidence of how those portions were carried out. This page is informational and does not constitute legal advice; specific compliance questions should be directed to the CNQ and to the notary's own advisors.

Article-by-article coverage

The tables below map the article-level requirements of N-3 and LCJTI that Certivant addresses to the platform feature that addresses them. Articles not listed here are not in Certivant's scope — they remain the notary's responsibility (drafting the act, keeping the minute book, holding professional liability insurance, and so on). See Limitations and shared responsibility below.

Loi sur le notariat (N-3)

Article 10 — Identification of the notary. The notary must be identifiable as a current member of the Chambre des notaires du Québec, with a verifiable CNQ membership number, on every act they receive. What Certivant does: the workspace settings capture the notary's CNQ membership number on the organisation profile. A super-admin accreditation review records the date and identity of the verifier before the notary-specific features unlock. The CNQ number appears on every Certificate of Verification (see Article 51) so the act's recipient and any future reviewer can match the certificate to a named professional.

Article 11 — Verification of the applicant's identity. Before receiving an act, the notary must satisfy themselves of each party's identity, with the remote verification at least as reliable as a face-to-face check. What Certivant does: the platform runs a documented identity-verification pipeline on each party — OCR of a government-issued photo identity document (passport, driver's licence, provincial ID, residence permit), authenticity signals on the document image (security-feature checks, tampering detection), a live selfie capture, a face-match score between selfie and document photo, and a liveness check confirming a real human is present at the time of capture. Each step's input, output, score and timestamp is recorded in the audit log; the notary reviews and approves each party in the host console before signing is enabled.

Article 43 — Live presence of the parties. A remote notarial act requires that the notary and the parties be present to one another, by a technological means that supports synchronous audio and video, throughout the receipt of the act. What Certivant does: the Certivant Conference feature opens a synchronous, end-to-end-protected video session in which the notary (as host) and each party are visible and audible to one another. The session is recorded with all participants' knowledge; the recording is retained alongside the rest of the file (see Data residency and retention) and referenced by URL on the Certificate of Verification.

Article 46 — Interruption with justification. Any interruption to the conduct of the act must be logged with a justification. What Certivant does: the host's "Pause" control requires a written reason (minimum length enforced) before the conference may be paused. While paused, every participant sees a full-screen banner indicating the act is paused, and all signing actions are disabled server-side — the API refuses signing-trigger creation until the conference resumes. Both pause and resumption are written to the audit log with actor, timestamp and reason, and reproduced on the Certificate of Verification.

Article 47 — Confirmation of reading. Each party must confirm having read the document or documents in scope before signing. What Certivant does: the Reading Confirmation step displays each in-scope document to each participant and presents two explicit options — "I confirm I have read this" or "I contest" with a free-text reason. The contest path opens an inline back-and-forth with the notary, who can respond and either close the contest or escalate. The signing trigger is refused by the server until every party has affirmatively confirmed every document in scope; the resulting per-participant, per-document log of confirmations and any contest exchanges is preserved with the act.

Article 49 — Absent participant. If a party is absent at the moment of the act, the notary may declare them absent and proceed under the conditions the law allows; the absence and its reason must be logged. What Certivant does: the participant panel in the conference offers a per-participant "Mark Absent" action restricted to the host, with a mandatory reason. Sign-triggers for that participant are refused by the platform and tagged in the response as skippedAbsent. The audit log records the actor, time and reason; the Certificate of Verification reflects any absent parties so the dossier reads consistently with what actually occurred.

Article 50 — Declaration of the place of reception. Each party to a remote notarial act must declare, on the record, the physical place from which they participate. What Certivant does: once every party has been ID-verified, the platform automatically prompts each party to submit their reception location — street address, city, province, country, postal code. The notary reviews and approves each submission from the host console; the platform refuses to enable signing until every reception location has been approved. The captured locations are written to the audit log and printed on the Certificate of Verification.

Article 51 — Certification of the act. The notary's signed certification is the evidence that the act was received in conformity with the law. What Certivant does: on approval of a verification request that came through a notarial conference, Certivant generates a Certificate of Verification PDF consolidating everything the notary attaches to the dossier — applicant identity attributes (with masking for sensitive document numbers per tenant policy), the verification decision, the risk-score factors, the sanctions / PEP / adverse-media check results, the liveness and face-match scores, the conference recording reference (URL, duration, participants), the reception locations, the reading-confirmation log, the audit-log chain hash, and the notary's CNQ number. The PDF is signed with a PKCS#7 digital signature embedded in the document, and an RFC 3161 trusted timestamp from an external Time Stamping Authority is bound into the signature. A public verification page at /verify/<certificateId> lets any party — the notary, the recipient of the act, an inspector — confirm the certificate has not been altered since issue by recomputing the chain hash against the audit log and validating both the PKCS#7 signature and the TSA timestamp.

Loi concernant le cadre juridique des technologies de l'information (LCJTI, C-1.1)

Article 25 — Cryptographic safeguards on documents containing personal information. LCJTI requires that confidentiality of a technology-based document containing personal information be protected by appropriate means, including cryptographic safeguards proportionate to the sensitivity of the information. What Certivant does: all data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 or higher with modern cipher suites. Provider credentials and other application secrets are encrypted by the application before storage, and identity documents and selfies are kept in private storage and served only through the authenticated application or short-lived signed links. The production environment being commissioned for general availability encrypts databases, file storage and backups at rest with AES-256 (or equivalent). Per-tenant encryption keys held in a key-management service — versioned, rotatable on demand, with every key access logged — are being rolled out to personal-data fields on the Enterprise tier; this page will be updated when they are in operation.

Article 27 — Access logs. LCJTI requires the person responsible for a technology-based document to keep a log of accesses sufficient to identify the persons who consulted it and the actions taken. What Certivant does: the platform maintains an immutable, hash-chained audit log for every meaningful action — verification request created, document uploaded, OCR run, face match scored, liveness scored, sanctions check executed, conference started or paused (with reason), participant marked absent (with reason), reception location submitted, reading confirmed, contest opened, sign trigger created, certificate issued, document accessed, decision rendered, request closed. Each entry includes the timestamp, the actor, the resource touched, and a hash that chains it cryptographically to the previous entry. The chain hash is included on the Certificate of Verification and can be verified through the public verification endpoint — a single altered entry breaks the chain and is detectable without trusting Certivant.

Provisions governing electronic signatures and document integrity. LCJTI recognises that an electronic document has the same legal value as a paper document, provided its integrity is preserved through its life cycle, and that an electronic signature is admissible where the link between the signature and the signatory can be established and the integrity of the signed document can be verified. What Certivant does: the Certificate of Verification PDF is signed with PKCS#7 (CAdES-style) embedded signatures so the signature travels with the document, and an RFC 3161 trusted timestamp binds an attested time of signing, sourced from an external accredited Time Stamping Authority. Any modification to the PDF after signing breaks the signature and is detected by any standards-compliant PDF viewer; the public verification endpoint additionally recomputes the audit-log chain hash bound into the certificate and reports any drift.

Data residency and retention

The production environment being commissioned for general availability will provision Quebec tenants with their primary data store in a Canadian region. Conference recordings, identity documents and signed certificates will be written to storage in the same Canadian region as the tenant's database, with cross-region replication outside Canada disabled so that no copy of the data leaves Canada at the platform layer, and backups will stay within the tenant's region. Some optional verification features (such as document reading, vendor liveness and AI-assisted checks) may process data outside Canada; our sub-processor list identifies where each provider processes data, and these features can be left disabled. The data-class-by-region mapping — which class of record lives where and is retained for how long — is documented in our internal compliance pack (docs/compliance/data-residency-by-class.md) and made available to subscribers and their auditors under non-disclosure agreement.

Default retention for material associated with a notarial act is ten (10) years from the date the verification request closes, in line with the retention obligations a Quebec notary is subject to for the records associated with a notarial act. A subscriber may instruct a longer retention through the dashboard. Hard deletion outside of retention windows is supported on subscriber instruction, subject to overriding legal obligations the subscriber or Certivant is itself subject to.

Audit and certification

  • Hash-chained immutable audit log. Every action on the platform writes an entry; each entry's hash incorporates the previous entry's hash. The chain head is included on the Certificate of Verification, and the public verification endpoint at /verify/<certificateId> recomputes it on demand.
  • Per-tenant data residency on Enterprise (being commissioned). The tenant will choose the region of its primary data store at provisioning; Quebec tenants will be routed to a Canadian region by default.
  • Per-tenant KMS keys on Enterprise (being rolled out). Rotatable keys held in a key-management service, with on-demand rotation re-keying existing encrypted fields through a background process.
  • SOC 2 Type II programme (in preparation). Certivant aligns to SOC 2 Type II (Security, Availability, Confidentiality); the audit report will be available to subscribers under NDA once issued, and the programme is described on our Security and Compliance page.
  • CNQ accreditation support. Certivant supplies, on request, the technical artifacts a CNQ inspector typically asks to see during an accreditation review of a notary's technology stack — the data-residency mapping, the audit-log specification, the certificate-signing specification, and a sample signed Certificate of Verification.

Limitations and shared responsibility

It is worth stating plainly: Certivant is a tool, not a notary. Certivant carries out the technical, evidence-producing parts of a remote notarial act with precision and auditability — identity verification, live presence, pause logging, reading confirmation, absence handling, reception-location capture, certified output. It does not, and cannot, replace the professional judgement of the notary receiving the act. The following remain the notary's responsibility and are out of Certivant's scope.

  • The decision to receive the act. Certivant returns scores, signals and check results. The notary decides whether the applicant has been satisfactorily identified and whether to proceed. A face-match score above threshold is not a substitute for the notary's own judgement of the person in front of them on screen.
  • The drafting of the act. Certivant does not draft notarial acts; the instrument received remains the work of the notary.
  • The notarial minute book ("greffe"). The signed Certificate of Verification is intended to be attached to the dossier the notary maintains in their minute book. Certivant does not maintain that minute book.
  • The notary–client relationship. The duties of advice, impartiality and professional secrecy run between the notary and the parties, not between Certivant and anyone.
  • Professional liability insurance. The notary is required by the CNQ to carry professional liability insurance. Certivant's commercial agreement does not replace that coverage.
  • Non-technical obligations of N-3 and LCJTI. Articles not enumerated above are not in Certivant's scope.

We state these limits explicitly so a CNQ inspector reading this page understands exactly what Certivant is being relied on for, and what it is not.

Contact

For accreditation, compliance or audit questions related to Quebec notarial use:

Management-Ware Solutions Inc. Compliance Office — Certivant Montréal, Québec, Canada Email: compliance@certivant.com

For privacy questions, see our Privacy Policy. For the security-control posture summarised across all jurisdictions, see Security and Compliance. For contractual terms, see our Terms of Service.

Authoritative statutory texts are published by the Éditeur officiel du Québec: