Patent Drawing in Montreal.

A patent drawing Montreal applicant files travels about 200 kilometres up the Ottawa River and stays inside Quebec the whole way: the Canadian Patent Office sits at Place du Portage I, 50 Victoria Street, Gatineau. The dispute, if one comes, is heard at 30 McGill Street in Old Montreal. Between those two addresses is a requirement that no other Canadian city feels the way Montreal does — Patent Rules s.46 requires the text matter in the drawings to be entirely in English or entirely in French, and a bilingual city produces bilingual engineering files. PerspireIP prepares figures for Montreal’s aerospace corridor, the Mila-adjacent AI cluster, the pharmaceutical belt and the game studios, and we settle the language question before a single reference numeral is placed.

The rule a patent drawing Montreal filing hits first: one language, all the way through

Most Canadian drawing checklists never mention language, because for an applicant in Toronto or Calgary it never comes up. In Montreal it comes up on most files.

Patent Rules s.46 is unambiguous: “The text matter in the abstract, the description, the drawings and the claims, other than any text matter contained in a sequence listing, must be entirely in English or entirely in French.” Note what that sentence does. It names the drawings alongside the claims, and it says entirely. There is no mixed-language option, no English figure with a French description, and no bilingual label on a flowchart box.

The practical consequence for a Montreal engineering team is specific. Source CAD files, instrument exports and internal block diagrams in this city routinely carry a mix — an English part-naming convention inherited from a US customer alongside French annotations from the shop floor. That mixture is invisible until a figure is placed on a sheet, and then it is a formal defect running through the whole set.

The useful part of s.46 is that it cuts both ways: filing and prosecuting entirely in French is a real option at CIPO, not a courtesy. If your inventors, your description and your drawings are French, there is no need to translate anything into English to obtain a Canadian patent. The decision is only costly when it is made late, because it forces a re-lettering pass across every sheet rather than a choice at the outset.

One more distinction worth drawing clearly, because it causes confusion in Quebec: the Charter of the French Language governs commerce, product labelling, public signage and consumer-facing documents in the province. It does not govern what language you prosecute a federal patent application in. CIPO is a federal office administering the Patent Act; s.46 is the only language rule that binds your figures. We set out the broader national position in our guide to patent drawings in Canada.

Colour reaches Canada through one door only, and there is no petition

This is where Canada is stricter than both of its main trading partners, and where a Montreal filer coming off a US or European family gets caught.

Patent Rules s.59(1) requires drawings to be in black, in sufficiently dense and dark, well-defined lines, and states that they must not be photographs. That is a flat prohibition. It is not the US formulation, where 37 CFR 1.84(b)(1) treats photographs as “not ordinarily permitted” and admits them when they are the only practicable medium.

s.59(2) opens the only exception: photographs are allowed where the invention does not admit of illustration by a compliant drawing but does admit of illustration by a photograph. That is a test of capability, not of preference or convenience.

Then s.59(3) closes the loop: “Except in the case of photographs, the drawings must be without colourings.” Read those three together and the structure is unusual. Colour reaches a Canadian patent application only through the photograph door, and Canada offers no petition route at all. There is no Canadian equivalent of a petition under 37 CFR 1.84(a)(2) with a fee under 1.17(h), because there is nothing to petition for.

Compare the two offices a Montreal family usually also touches. In a US utility application colour is available on a granted petition with the 1.17(h) fee and a prescribed statement in the specification. The EPO has gone further: since 1 October 2025 it accepts colour and greyscale drawings in applications filed electronically (Decision of the President, OJ EPO 2025, A49; Notice, OJ EPO 2025, A57). Canada moved in neither direction.

So the sequencing rule for a Montreal portfolio is to build the Canadian set first, in monochrome, and derive the colour variants from it — not the other way round. And if the family is travelling by PCT, the point is academic anyway: PCT Rule 11.13(a) still requires black lines “without colorings”.

AI and software figures: where s.46 and s.59(13) collide

Montreal’s AI concentration — Mila, the Université de Montréal and McGill research groups, and the corporate labs that followed them — produces a figure type that is unusually exposed to the Canadian rules, because software figures are made almost entirely of text.

A neural-network architecture diagram, a training-pipeline flowchart or a state machine is a set of boxes with words in them. Two rules bite at once. s.59(13) permits no text matter in a drawing except what is indispensable to understanding it, so a flowchart has to justify every word it carries. And s.46 then requires that whatever words survive be in the same single language as the description. A French-language application cannot carry an English flowchart, however standard the terminology is in the field.

That interacts badly with how AI figures are actually produced here. The terminology of the field is English — “encoder”, “attention head”, “loss”, “embedding” — and the research artefacts the drawings come from are English even in francophone labs. A French filing therefore requires a deliberate lexical pass, not a machine translation, and the labels have to match the description word for word afterwards.

There is a substantive dimension too. Patent Act s.27(8) provides that no patent shall be granted for any mere scientific principle or abstract theorem, and the Federal Court’s decision in Choueifaty v Canada (Attorney General), 2020 FC 837, rejected CIPO’s then “problem-solution” approach to construing computer-implemented claims in favour of purposive construction. The practical effect on figures is that the drawings carrying the implementation — the data flow, the hardware context, the specific architecture — do real work. A diagram that shows only mathematics invites exactly the objection you are trying to avoid.

Our framework for assessing the tools that generate these diagrams is in the companion post on how to evaluate patent drawing software.

Aerospace: the figure sets that dominate Montreal filings

Montreal is one of the world’s three largest aerospace clusters, and aerospace is the single biggest influence on what a Montreal drawing brief looks like.

The anchors are familiar: Bombardier, Pratt & Whitney Canada in Longueuil, CAE, Bell Textron Canada in Mirabel, Airbus Canada building the A220 at Mirabel, and Héroux-Devtek, surrounded by several hundred suppliers. Their output is the most demanding mechanical figure work in Canadian practice:

• Large assemblies with deep sub-assembly trees — which means exploded views, partial views that must reassemble correctly, and a reference-numeral scheme that has to stay stable across dozens of sheets.
• Sectional views with heavy hatching. s.59(4) sets an outcome test rather than a prescribed angle: hatching must not impede the clear reading of reference characters and lead lines. On a dense turbine or gearbox section that is a real design constraint, not a formality.
• Proportion. s.59(6) requires elements to be in proportion to each other unless a difference is necessary for clarity — the recurring tension in any figure showing a small feature on a large structure.
• Long certification-driven families with many divisionals, where figures are reused for twenty years and every inconsistency compounds.

Two supporting clusters shape the rest of the work. Pharmaceutical and life-sciences filings out of the Montreal belt bring process schematics, apparatus figures and data plots, and they bring term extension: a certificate of supplementary protection can add up to two years of additional protection for an eligible medicinal ingredient, so those figures stay commercially live past the twenty-year mark. And the game studios — Ubisoft Montreal, Eidos-Montréal, Warner Bros. Games Montréal — generate interface and rendering inventions whose appearance is protected as an industrial design rather than a patent.

On that last point, a terminology correction that matters on a Canadian file: Canada does not grant design patents. Appearance is protected by registration under the Industrial Design Act, a separate right with its own register and its own representation requirements. There is no Canadian analogue of 37 CFR 1.152, so US design-patent drawing conventions — broken-line claim boundaries, the prescribed single claim — do not transfer. See our note on design patent drawing requirements for the US position those conventions come from.

Where a Montreal patent is actually enforced

Canadian patent litigation is overwhelmingly federal, and Montreal has the court in the old city.

The Federal Court of Canada sits at 30 McGill Street, Montréal, Quebec H2Y 3Z7, which also houses the Federal Court of Appeal’s Montreal registry. The Federal Court has nationwide jurisdiction over patents and, importantly, it is the only court that can declare a Canadian patent invalid with effect against the world — Patent Act s.60 impeachment proceedings are brought there. A provincial court cannot strike a patent off the register.

The Quebec Superior Court can hear an infringement action, and occasionally does, but it can only treat validity as a defence between the parties in front of it. In practice that asymmetry decides venue: a defendant who wants the patent gone, rather than merely wants to win, ends up in the Federal Court. Appeals go to the Federal Court of Appeal and from there to the Supreme Court of Canada only with leave.

Two features of Canadian practice put figures under the microscope early. Claims are construed purposively, following Free World Trust v Électro Santé Inc., 2000 SCC 66, and Whirlpool Corp v Camco Inc., 2000 SCC 67 — and the drawings are part of the specification the skilled person reads. Separately, pharmaceutical disputes run under the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations as full actions in the Federal Court with a twenty-four month statutory stay, which is a compressed timetable in which to discover that a figure contradicts the description.

Note what is not available. Canada is not a European Patent Convention state. There is no validating a European patent into Canada and the Unified Patent Court has no reach here. Protection comes from a direct national filing at CIPO or from PCT national-phase entry, due at 30 months from the earliest priority date under s.154(1) — not the 31 months some dockets default to. s.154(3) allows late entry within a further twelve months on a statement that the failure was unintentional, plus a reinstatement fee. Treat that as a rescue, not a plan.

Amending a Montreal figure set without adding matter

Figures get corrected during prosecution, and Canada’s limit on correction is worded more generously than Europe’s — which is precisely why people trip over it.

Patent Act s.38.2(2) prohibits an amendment that would add matter “that cannot reasonably be inferred from the specification or drawings contained in the application on its filing date.” Compare EPO Article 123(2), where the test is whether the matter is directly and unambiguously derivable from the application as filed. “Reasonably be inferred” is a softer standard, so a clarifying detail that the EPO would refuse can sometimes be added in Canada.

Do not over-read that. s.38.2(3) extends the test to the original-language documents and their English or French translation, which is the point where a Montreal translation decision comes back around: if a figure’s labels were translated, the added-matter question is asked against both versions.

Two consistency rules carry most of the risk in an amendment. s.59(11) provides that a reference character not mentioned in the description must not appear in a drawing and vice versa — an explicitly two-way obligation. s.59(12) then requires the same reference character to be used for the same element throughout the abstract, the description and the drawings, which is broader than the US rule and catches abstracts that were drafted first and never revisited.

So the audit before any amendment goes out is mechanical: every numeral in the drawings reconciled against the description, every numeral in the description reconciled against the drawings, the abstract checked against both, and the whole thing checked in whichever single language the file is in. Our deeper treatment is in the post on patent drawing reference numerals.

What a patent drawing Montreal project includes

We work from whatever exists — CAD assemblies, architecture diagrams, instrument output, photographs or sketches on paper — and return filing-ready sheets plus editable sources.

• Language decided first. We confirm whether the file is going in entirely in English or entirely in French under s.46, then letter every sheet to that choice. This is the first question, not a formatting detail at the end.
• Monochrome master, derived variants. Canadian sheets built in black line under s.59(1) and (3), with colour or greyscale variants derived afterwards for the US petition route or an electronic EPO filing.
• Photograph triage. Where a photograph is unavoidable, we document why the invention does not admit of illustration by a compliant drawing, which is the s.59(2) test CIPO will actually apply.
• Margins and lettering. Drawing pages at 2.5 cm top, 2.5 cm left, 1.5 cm right and 1.0 cm bottom under s.47(2) — identical to 37 CFR 1.84(g), so one sheet clears Gatineau and Alexandria — with characters at or above the 0.32 cm minimum in s.59(7).
• Two-way numeral audit. Drawings against description, description against drawings, and the abstract against both, per s.59(11) and s.59(12).
• Industrial design representations handled separately. Appearance work prepared to the Industrial Design Act requirements, not to patent drawing rules or to US design-patent conventions.

Seven checks before a Montreal filing goes out: one language throughout, including every figure label; black line only, with photographs justified under s.59(2) or absent; no colourings anywhere outside a photograph; drawing-page margins at 2.5/2.5/1.5/1.0 cm; characters at least 0.32 cm high; hatching that does not obscure reference characters or lead lines; and numerals reconciled in both directions and against the abstract.

See our full Patent Drawing services, the companion Patent Drawing in Toronto page, and our wider IP services in Canada.

IP Landscape & Resources in Montreal

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Montreal:

• Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) — examines and grants Canadian patents and registers industrial designs, administering the Patent Act and the Patent Rules (SOR/2019-251) from Place du Portage I, 50 Victoria Street, Gatineau, Quebec
• Federal Court of Canada — hears Canadian patent infringement and s.60 impeachment proceedings with nationwide jurisdiction, sitting in Montreal at 30 McGill Street and the only court that can invalidate a Canadian patent against the world
• Patent Rules (SOR/2019-251) — the consolidated Canadian Patent Rules, including s.46 on the single-language requirement for text matter in the drawings, s.47(2) on drawing-page margins and s.59 on the form of drawings

Request Patent Drawings for a Montreal Filing

Explore related PerspireIP services: Patent Drawing services · Patent Drawings in Canada · IP services in Canada · Patent Drawing in Toronto · Evaluate patent drawing software.

Frequently Asked Questions