Yes. Every doctorate awarded by a Canadian university requires a thesis. What has changed over the past decade is not the requirement but the form it can take, and that distinction is where most of the confusion around this question comes from.
The short answer
There is no accredited route to a doctorate in Canada that skips the thesis. The clearest institutional statement comes from the University of Toronto’s School of Graduate Studies: “All doctoral theses must contain a written component; however, other elements may be included in addition to the written text.”
Read that sentence carefully, because both halves matter. The written component is not optional. Everything else about the format is negotiable within your discipline’s norms.
If you have seen a programme advertised as having “no dissertation”, it is almost always a US professional doctorate marketed under different terminology, or a programme where a substantial capstone project is called something other than a thesis. In Canada the requirement is consistent across research and professional doctorates alike.
Thesis or dissertation: which word to use
The vocabulary is a source of needless anxiety, so here is the map.
In Canada the two words mean the same thing. McGill’s library guides put it directly: the written presentation of research leading to a graduate degree “is called a thesis (or dissertation, at McGill the terms are used interchangeably).”
In the United Kingdom the split is the reverse of what most students expect. Oxford’s lifelong learning department explains that “in the UK, a thesis is the term used for a piece of writing submitted for an undergraduate degree or a doctorate, and a dissertation is the final piece of writing submitted for a Master’s degree.”
In the United States the convention is inverted again. A thesis is the master’s document and a dissertation is the doctoral one.
For anything you submit to a Canadian graduate studies office, use the word your own university uses in its guidelines. Quebec universities are more consistent than the rest of the country here: a mémoire is the master’s document and a thèse is the doctoral one, with no overlap.
Research doctorates require a thesis, without exception
The PhD and its equivalents are defined by the thesis. It is not a course requirement bolted onto the programme; it is the degree.
The University of Toronto describes the doctoral thesis as “the culmination of your investment in advanced studies and rigorous research in your field of study,” and requires that it make a distinct contribution to knowledge in the field. That standard, an original contribution, is what separates doctoral work from a long master’s thesis.
The credit weight makes the point concretely. At UQAM, the psychology department’s own documentation records that the Ph.D. thesis is now worth 48 credits, within a thesis block totalling 57 credits. At ESG UQAM’s doctorate in administration, the four-year structure runs through coursework and a comprehensive examination worth 30 credits, then a thesis proposal, then the final thesis deposit. In both cases the thesis is the majority of the degree by weight.
Professional doctorates and alternative formats
This is where the honest answer becomes more interesting than a simple yes.
Canadian universities have been broadening what a thesis can look like. The University of Toronto’s doctoral thesis guidelines note that while “the doctoral thesis has been historically written as a unified work in some disciplines, or a publication-based thesis in other disciplines,” there is now “a growing acceptance of more flexible formats and structures that aim to enhance professional practice or that include creative scholarly artefacts such as film, audio, visual, and graphic representations,” alongside “growing recognition of the need to welcome Indigenous forms of knowledge building and dissemination.”
Four formats are worth knowing.
The monograph. A single unified argument across chapters. Still the default in the humanities and much of the social sciences.
The manuscript-based or integrated article thesis. The central chapters are journal articles, published, submitted or in preparation. Western University’s Senate policy sets out format requirements for monograph and integrated article theses side by side. McGill goes further and publishes two separate official Word templates, one traditional and one for manuscript-based theses.
The multimodal thesis. The written component is accompanied by other elements: films, videos, poems, novels, play scripts, performances, artwork. Western’s policy anticipates this explicitly, recommending that “diverse format artifacts” be accompanied by titling, a title page, an abstract and keywords, a summary for a lay audience, a CV, and where appropriate an authorship statement and ethics approval.
The professional doctoral thesis in practice. The University of Toronto defines it as work that “includes the identification and investigation of a problem in practice, the application of theory, research and policy analysis to the problem of practice.” The object of study is a professional problem rather than a gap in the literature, but the analytical demands and the written component remain.
Some professional doctorates go further and substitute a different document altogether. UQAM’s Psy.D. is the clearest Canadian example: the department’s guidelines describe the essai as the research work that replaces the former thesis, worth 18 credits against the Ph.D. thesis’s 48. The requirement to produce and defend an original piece of written research does not disappear; its scope is calibrated to a practitioner degree.
What changes in the deposit requirements
Choosing a format is not only an intellectual decision. It changes the package your graduate studies office will check.
Front matter grows. A multimodal thesis at Western needs the artefact documented with its own titling, abstract, keywords and lay summary. A manuscript-based thesis needs a contribution of authors statement naming every co-author and what each contributed.
Connecting materials become mandatory. An integrated article thesis is not a stapled set of papers. Western’s policy is explicit that connecting material between chapters is required, and that a thesis consisting solely of published articles with no connecting elements is not acceptable.
Abstract limits still apply, whatever the format. The University of Toronto caps the abstract at 350 words for a doctoral thesis and 150 words for a master’s thesis. Western uses the same two figures and adds a separate lay summary of at most 350 words. Université de Montréal allows 500 words and two pages for a thèse, plus a maximum of ten keywords. McGill measures in characters, with a 4,000-character ceiling.
The layout rules do not bend. Margins, line spacing, pagination of front matter and the order of preliminary pages are checked the same way for a film-accompanied thesis as for a monograph.
Time and length: what you are actually committing to
A Canadian research doctorate is typically four years of registered study after a master’s, and the thesis dominates the second half of it.
On length, the published figures are consistent. McMaster states that “the text of the Ph.D. thesis must not exceed 300 pages double spaced.” The University of New Brunswick sets 400 pages, or 100,000 words, from title page to CV. Polytechnique Montréal recommends no more than 175 pages, against 100 for a master’s.
Roughly, a doctoral thesis is twice a master’s thesis. We cover the master’s side of that comparison in detail, including the discipline-by-discipline figures, in how many pages is a master’s thesis. If you are still choosing between levels, how to write a master’s thesis sets out the smaller commitment.
Manuscript-based theses often finish shorter in page count because the articles have already been compressed to journal limits. That is a real advantage, but it comes with the connecting materials and co-authorship documentation described above.
Conclusion
The answer to the question is yes, and it has never seriously been no in Canada. What is worth knowing is that “thesis” no longer means one thing. Before you commit to a structure, ask your supervisor and your graduate studies office two questions: which formats does my faculty accept, and what does each one change in the deposit package. Those two answers shape three years of writing.
Last verified: 2026-09-03.