FORT FRANCES—The Town of Fort Frances’ clerk’s office will start performing civil marriages beginning this fall after council passed the applicable bylaw Monday night.
“Our target is to be ready for the latter half of September,” Clerk Glenn Treftlin said Tuesday, adding the actual start date will be contingent on the receipt of registration material from the Office of the Registrar General.
“They have to assign us a number and give us a marriage register,” he noted. “And then we have to prepare some documentation, like arrangement agreements and that sort of thing.”
Treftlin noted both he and deputy clerk Kathy Lawson have been trained to solemnize civil marriages.
While the province empowered clerks to perform civil marriages back in 2004, town council put off drafting a bylaw to make it so pending completion of training of someone who could solemnize marriages.
But attempts over the past few years to hold the necessary training, as required by the Office of the Registrar General, in Northwestern Ontario were unsuccessful “because of insufficient participants to hold a training course,” explained Treftlin.
He added that it was only recently that he and Lawson attended an in-house training session in the City of Dryden, where Clerk Colleen Brosseau has been performing civil marriages since 2006.
Once they do start doing them, civil marriages will be performed Friday afternoons only by appointment.
The ceremony will be performed in Council Chambers at the Civic Centre, as well as possibly (weather permitting) in front of the town hall if the couple so chooses.
Eventually, if the demand is there, off-site, after-hours, or weekend solemnizations also will be considered, noted Treftlin.
The fee for a civil marriage service will be $250, which is in line with what other regional municipalities charge (Thunder Bay charges $300, Schreiber charges $250, Marathon $215, and Dryden charges $200 currently, but this amount is under review).
Couples can get their marriage licence at the town hall here or have their civil marriage solemnized after getting a licence issued elsewhere in Ontario (they have 90 days to get married before the licence becomes invalid).
“If a couple comes in and wants to have a marriage service performed here, they’ll present their licence and we’ll go through the documentation,” explained Treftlin.
“We’ll explain to them there’s no rice, no confetti. If they have a personal preference for vows between the parties, we’ll take that into account as well—as long as they’re appropriate.
“And we’ll speak to them about no alcohol, nothing like that.
“That’s the type of stuff we have to work on, to get into documentation form,” he added. “How it’s going to happen, what we can do and can’t do, what they can do and can’t do.”
Treftlin said civil marriages performed by the clerk’s office provide an alternative for couples who want to tie the knot. Justices of the Peace are able to perform civil marriages, but many of them have elected not to do so for their own reasons in recent years.
“It’s an option on their part. Those that we are aware of locally are not exercising that option,” he noted.
Up until now, Treftlin said requests for civil marriages here have had to be redirected to Dryden or Thunder Bay—the two closest locales in the region they can get them.
“Kenora isn’t doing it, and I’m not sure if any other municipalities in the district are looking at doing the same thing,” he noted. “But there’s no indication it’s going to happen anywhere else soon.
“We figured it is a service we could provide here, so we’re doing our best to do that.”
Treftlin said once the clerk’s office does start solemnizing civil marriages, he’s pretty sure requests will start rolling in.
“When I first was looking into it, we were issuing licences to couples that were looking for a civil marriage maybe six or seven times throughout the year. That’s not a lot,” he remarked.
“[But] I think that once it gets known that we’re doing it here, the traffic might increase a bit,” added Treftlin. “We don’t know what kind of impact it might on those coming up from south of the border.
“Maybe if it’s known we do it here, we might get some traffic up from down there, too.”
As soon as the clerk’s office is ready to perform civil marriages here, all the relevant information will be available on the town’s website at www.fort-frances.com
(Fort Frances Times)
Fort Frances Times
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