Katherine Pomerleau is a Commissioner of Oaths for New Brunswick, working from Grand-Barachois along the same stretch of the Northumberland Strait as Cap-Pelé. The work itself is narrow and practical: administering oaths and affirmations, and witnessing statutory declarations and affidavits, in person, for people who have a form that has to be sworn.
Cap-Pelé is a fishing community first. More than twenty smokehouses operate in the area, producing the large majority of Canada's smoked herring, and the fishing year runs in distinct blocks — herring in the spring, mackerel in early summer, lobster from the middle of August to the middle of October. Much of the work in the smokehouses is seasonal too. A working year shaped like that produces employment records, income declarations and insurance paperwork on a schedule, and some of those forms have to be sworn rather than simply signed.
The fishing and processing industry here has drawn workers from well beyond the province, and many have stayed and raised families in the area. Settling somewhere generates a particular kind of document: declarations of identity, of residence, of relationship, and the supporting statements that go with applications made to governments. These are exactly the forms that name a commissioner on the signature line, and they are usually needed at short notice.
Acadian families along this shore have been salting and smoking the catch since the 1840s, and a good many of the operations here have stayed in the same families since. A business held that long eventually passes to someone else, and that passing produces its own documents: declarations supporting an estate, statements about who owned what, and affidavits confirming a relationship or a succession. They are ordinary forms, but they are the ones where a missing sworn signature stops everything else in the file.
Bring the document unsigned — the signature belongs in front of the commissioner, not before. Please note that a commissioner of oaths does not notarize or certify documents and cannot tell you what your document should say; for that you need a lawyer.