Wedding Officiant

My brother actually did that for his friend's wedding, he got ordained online but I think he was more of an mc for the ceremony as opposed to the actual officiant. I wasn't there and it was a few years ago so my details are blurry, sorry! But I do know it's possible!

Otherwise, if you're looking for an officiant, we've hired Michelle from Transcendent Ceremonies (she is on wedding wire if you want to find her). We're getting married October 24, 2020 and booked in June because we didn't want to wait. She is incredible and I've only heard amazing things about her...she literally creates a ceremony just for you! Her fee is pretty much 565 with taxes, but she's worth it! Good luck!

View quoted message Thanks so much for your insight! I’m going to start looking into option 3 as well, ideally I’d like to avoid having to hire another vendor. We’re trying to cut costs where possible.

I went through the same struggle! My fiancé and I are getting married in August 2021, and we wanted his mother to officiate our wedding. We did a lot of research and we found a few options:

1. There is a way to do a course and become certified as a wedding officiant. However, this seemed very complicated, especially that my fiancé's mother lives in a different country, and it looked like it's a whole process with some things needing to be done in person.

2. You can get an officiant to be there on your wedding day just to sign the paperwork and take care of the legal aspects. Like some people mentioned, All Seasons is a good resource for officiants. Your friend could still do the whole ceremony.

3. You can get legally married at City Hall prior to your wedding day and your friend could perform the ceremony on the day of.

We're going with option 3. It's cheaper, simpler, and since we're having an intimate wedding, we wanted to avoid having a stranger there to sign the paperwork. Good luck!

Thanks everyone for the great insight! Super helpful and I will definitely check out officiants.

There are officiants that will allow you to have someone else conduct part of the ceremony - but in Ontario they legally have to be the ones to do specific things - like confirming you are there of your own free will and declaring you husband and wife.

Asking a friend or family member isn't a bad idea at all to marry you and FH. The only thing they would have to do is an online certification to do so.

An alternative is to go the legal process of an Officiant through the City Hall of the actual building or outside which will be an extra cost depending on the area. Other Officiants can also marry you from outside source that have their license and may charge less. Seek your options fitting the best decision based on who will want to do the online certification or budget your cost for an actual Officiant.

You do not need to be ordained to perform a ceremony as long as there is an officiant present.

My sister in law performed our ceremony, our officiant stood by and witnessed and provided the paperwork and filed it afterwards.

We used All Seasons and they were amazing.

Check out all seasons officiants - you can have a friend perform the ceremony and one of their officiants will make it all legal!

All seasons wedding officiants

My FSIL wanted a family member to officiate their wedding and she wasn’t ordained so they looked into various options of how to do the legal portion of the ceremony and one of them was hiring an officiant to just be there waiting in the wings on the wedding to do the legal portion and licence signing. So officiants definitely will come on the wedding day to just do the parts of the ceremony that an unordained person cannot do.

There are definitely officiants who would do that. Our officiant actually includes that possibility (in the context of responsibilities) in his contract. It may be worth asking a few.