Short answer: for the past two years, Canadian and European authorities have gone beyond telling you "email us instead of faxing": they now publish digitisation standards that spell out the resolution, file format, colour depth and metadata expected of a scanned document. Canada has its Centre de solutions en imagerie de documents (Document Imaging Solutions Centre) and its Boîte à outils de la numérisation (Digitisation Toolkit) at Services publics et Approvisionnement Canada (Public Services and Procurement Canada); New Brunswick publishes a provincial Digitisation Standard; the European Union is moving ahead with the Berlin Declaration, the eIDAS 2 regulation and a Canada–European Union digital trade agreement that recognises electronic documents and signatures on both sides. The practical consequence for you: the quality of the image you send becomes just as important as the channel you use, and several offices that still listed a fax number in 2024 had quietly removed it by 2026. From Europe to Canada, you still dial 00 1 then the ten digits (514, 438, 450, 418, 819 in Quebec, 416, 613, 905 in Ontario); for Germany 00 49, Spain 00 34, Italy 00 39, Portugal 00 351, Belgium 00 32.
About MondialFax. This article is an informational guide, with no connection to any Canadian, provincial or European authority. MondialFax sends faxes free of charge and without registration to seven destinations (France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Canada) from a browser, with a daily sending limit. It does not assign a number and does not handle incoming faxes. See the supported countries page and the dialling code directory.
What "digitisation" means on the receiving end
When a government body talks about digitisation, it isn't talking about your scanner but about the chain that runs from the paper it receives to the electronic file it keeps. At Canada's federal level, Services publics et Approvisionnement Canada (Public Services and Procurement Canada) runs a Centre de solutions en imagerie de documents (Document Imaging Solutions Centre): an internal service that scans departmental documents in bulk, indexes them and feeds the records management systems. Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (Library and Archives Canada) governs what follows: retention periods, accepted formats, and the conditions for destroying the paper original.
In other words, your fax almost never ends up in a filing cabinet. It lands on a fax server, becomes a PDF, enters a sorting queue, and is then attached to a file number. If the image is poor, it fails at the character-recognition stage and a clerk has to retype it — or reject it. That is exactly the mechanism described in our guide to OCR processing of incoming faxes, seen this time from the receiving side.
Provincial standards are often more explicit than federal documents. New Brunswick's Digitisation Standard, for example, sets requirements such as:
| Item | Common expectation in published standards |
|---|---|
| Resolution | 300 dpi for text, 400 dpi for dense forms |
| Colour | Black and white accepted if the document has no mandatory colour markings |
| Format | PDF/A for preservation, TIFF tolerated in bulk imaging |
| Legibility | Text readable by OCR, no illegible flattened image |
| Integrity | Complete pages, correct order, nothing cropped |
A standard fax sent in "fine" mode runs at roughly 200 × 196 dots per inch. That is below the 300 dpi expected of a scanned document — which doesn't invalidate the fax, but it explains why some services now ask for an online upload when the document contains tables, handwritten figures or fine signatures.
Why a fax is still accepted anyway
Digitisation isn't killing the fax, for one simple reason: it solves the administration's problem, not the user's. A government portal assumes a recognised digital identity. And yet:
- clicSÉQUR in Quebec and CléGC / Partenaire de connexion (Sign-In Partner) at the Canadian federal level require a social insurance number, an active tax file or a Canadian bank. A French or Belgian resident often has none of these;
- FranceConnect, the Belgian eID, Germany's ELSTER, Spain's Cl@ve, Italy's SPID and Portugal's Chave Móvel Digital are tied to a residence and a national identification number. From abroad, activation stalls at a code sent by post or a visit to a counter;
- uploads come with size and page-count limits: a 90-page medical file or a thirty-year contribution statement won't go through in one piece.
In all three cases, the fax number printed at the bottom of an official page remains the only door open without an account. That is what we see in the immigration, pension and insurance cases described in Faxing a document to Ottawa in 2026.
The digital agreements changing the game between Europe and Canada
Two trends are converging in 2026.
On the European side, the Berlin Declaration on digital society and the eIDAS 2 regulation are rolling out the European digital identity wallet (EUDI Wallet) and extending mutual recognition of qualified electronic signatures between member states. In practical terms, a document signed electronically in Italy must be accepted in Spain. The national channels already in place — Italy's PEC, Germany's beA for lawyers, Belgium's eBox, Spain's registro electrónico (electronic register), Portugal's autenticação.gov — are gradually being plugged into it.
On the transatlantic side, negotiations for a Canada–European Union digital trade agreement, launched in 2023 as a follow-on to CETA, cover the legal validity of electronic contracts and signatures, data flows, and the ban on requiring a paper medium. That is the exact opposite of the fax's logic: once the agreement applies in full, a Canadian body will no longer be able to require a European company to send paper for a commercial transaction.
What this means in the short term: business-to-business flows will shift fast, while individual-to-government flows will stay mixed for several years. Keep a fax channel available for the latter, not the former.
Preparing a document that survives the digitisation chain
A fax sent from a browser isn't scanned by the recipient: it is your file that becomes the transmitted image. So quality is won at your end, at the moment of capture.
If you're starting from paper. A home flatbed scanner set to 300 dpi in greyscale almost always gives a better result than a phone photo. For bulky files — employment certificates, bank statements, medical records — a document scanner with an automatic feeder prevents skipped pages and preserves the order, which matters as much as sharpness when the other end indexes page by page. Lay the document perfectly flat: the folds in letters you've received create black bands that ruin OCR.
If you're starting from a screen. Export to PDF, never a screenshot. PDFs generated by a banking or tax portal already contain crisp text; flattening them to JPEG destroys that advantage.
If you need to sign. A fine ballpoint signature on white paper reproduces better than a fingertip scrawl on a tablet. For anyone who signs remotely often, a graphics tablet with a stylus produces a clean, exportable stroke without printing anything.
If you're processing incoming mail. Documents that arrive by post come folded in three. A desktop guillotine for trimming stapled bundles, or simply a rigid folder to flatten them overnight, transforms the legibility of the result. And if you archive your cross-border files, an expanding file with dividers remains more reliable than a pile on the corner of your desk — retention standards apply to your own copies too, as detailed in Archiving your faxes in 2026.
Contrast and noise. Before sending, look at the preview at 100%. If the letters run together or the background is grey, redo the scan rather than send: an illegible fax is legally a transmission, but administratively a failure.
Country by country: where digitisation has already closed the fax line
Canada and Quebec. The federal government is pushing its online services (CRA My Account, My Service Canada Account, the IRCC portal) but still publishes fax numbers for offline applications, signed forms and international files. In Quebec, RAMQ, Revenu Québec (Quebec Revenue) and Retraite Québec (Quebec Pension Board) keep sector-specific fax lines while Mon dossier (My Account) and clicSÉQUR absorb the rest. The local vocabulary is télécopieur (fax machine) and courriel (email): use it when you phone to confirm a number.
Germany. The shift is the most abrupt. Since several authorities switched off their fax lines and beA became standard for lawyers and KIM for healthcare, fax numbers have been vanishing from official websites. See Fax in Germany 2026.
Italy. PEC is mandatory for companies and regulated professions; the fax has almost no practical standing against it.
Spain. The registro electrónico (electronic register) is the official entry point for any procedure. Fax machines survive in hospitals and a few provincial services.
Portugal. CTT, Finanças (tax authority) and Segurança Social Direta (Direct Social Security) have moved everything online; the fax lingers in professional practices and small organisations.
Belgium. eBox and MyMinfin centralise everything; municipalities and health insurance funds keep fax numbers.
The common thread: digitisation on the government side is moving faster than identification on the user side. Hence the practical rule — check the number before every important transmission, by phone or on an official page dated that day, and never reuse a number you jotted down six months ago.
The end of copper, a quiet accelerator
Document digitisation is advancing alongside the shutdown of legacy telephone networks. A service that migrates to VoIP often discovers that its old fax machine no longer works over T.38, and takes the opportunity to pull the number from its website rather than pay for a gateway. In 2026 that is the most common cause of a public fax line disappearing — not a strategic decision, but an unrepaired breakdown. The country-by-country timetables are detailed in The end of copper outside France.
Frequently asked questions
Does a digitisation standard apply to what I send?
Not directly: these standards govern the administration's internal work. But they describe what its systems can read. Aiming for 300 dpi, clean black and white and a tidy PDF significantly improves the odds that your document is processed on the first pass.
Will my fax be rejected because it's only 200 dpi?
No. A fax received by a service that publishes a fax number is a valid transmission. The risk isn't formal rejection but a follow-up request: illegible document, resend required, time lost. Our capture settings are detailed in Illegible fax: resolution and contrast.
Does the Canada–EU digital trade agreement abolish the fax?
It abolishes the ability to require paper in the commercial exchanges it covers. It doesn't shut down any fax line and doesn't apply to an individual's personal dealings with a government body.
How can I tell whether a fax number is still active?
Three habits: look the number up on the official page of the service concerned (not on a third-party directory), call the switchboard to have it confirmed, and request a transmission confirmation when you send. The "verified" fax directories you come across online often recycle data from 2019.
Should I back up a fax with an online submission?
For a high-stakes case — immigration, pension, insurance claim, statutory deadline — yes: fax for the date, online submission or registered post for the paper trail. For a simple transfer of information, one channel is enough.
Key takeaways
- Canadian authorities (the Centre de solutions en imagerie de documents (Document Imaging Solutions Centre), the Boîte à outils de la numérisation (Digitisation Toolkit), provincial standards such as New Brunswick's) publicly describe the image quality they can process: 300 dpi, PDF/A, machine-readable text.
- A fax almost always lands in an automated chain: legibility determines processing, not validity.
- Digital agreements — eIDAS 2 in Europe, the Canada–EU digital trade negotiations — will remove the fax from business-to-business flows long before flows between individuals and public bodies.
- Digital identity (clicSÉQUR, CléGC, FranceConnect, SPID, Cl@ve, eID) remains the sticking point for non-residents: it is for them that the fax survives.
- Fax numbers often disappear because of VoIP migration, not an announced decision: check before every important transmission.
- Get the capture right upstream (flatbed or feeder scanner, PDF export, pen signature): it's the only part of the chain you control.
To send without a machine or registration to one of the seven destinations served, the form is on the home page, and the legal validity rules country by country are summarised on legal value of fax by country.
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