A Canadian postal code is a string of six characters that forms part of a postal address in Canada. Like British and Dutch postcodes, Canada's postal codes are alphanumeric. They are in the format A0A 0A0 , where A is a letter and 0 is a digit, with a space separating the third and fourth characters. An example is K1A 0B1, which is for Canada Post's Ottawa headquarters. According to Statistics Canada, about 850,000 postal codes exist in Canada, ranging from A0A in Newfoundland all the way to Y1A in Yukon.
Canada Post provides a free postal code look-up tool on its website, and sells hard-copy directories and CD-ROMs. Many vendors also sell validation tools, which allow customers to properly match addresses and postal codes. Hard-copy directories can also be consulted in all post offices.
History
City postal zones
Numbered postal zones were used in certain Canadian cities by the 1940s. Mail to a Toronto address in zone 5 would be addressed in this format:
As of 1943, the City of Toronto was divided into 14 zones, numbered from 1 to 15, except that 7 and 11 were unused, and there was a 2B zone.
In the late 1960s, the Post Office began implementing a 3-digit zone number scheme in major cities to replace existing 1- and 2-digit zone numbers. For example, zones numbered from 100 to 799 were assigned throughout Metropolitan Toronto, with a goal of sorting mail addresses into smaller districts. Toronto's renumbering took effect 1 May 1969, accompanied by an advertising campaign under the slogan "Your number is up". The system was introduced during 1968 in Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Montreal, and Windsor. Besides Toronto, the system was to have expanded in 1969 to London, Ottawa, Quebec City, and Vancouver.
With impending plans for a national postal code system, Postmaster General Eric Kierans announced that the Post Office would begin cancelling the new 3-digit city zone system. Companies changed their mail addressing at their own expense only to find the new zoning would prove to be short-lived.
Planning
As the largest Canadian cities were growing in the 1950s and 1960s, the volumes of mail passing through the country's postal system also grew, reaching billions by the 1950s, and tens of billions by the mid 1960s. Consequently, it was becoming progressively more difficult for employees who hand-sorted mail to memorize and keep track of all the individual letter carrier routes within each city. New technology that allowed mail to be delivered at a faster speed also contributed to the pressure for these employees to properly sort the mail. Canada was one of the last Western countries to get a nationwide postal code system. A report tabled in the House of Commons in 1969 dealt with the expected impact of "environmental change" on the Post Office operations over the following 25 years. A key recommendation was the "establishment of a task force to determine the nature of the automation and mechanization the Post Office should adopt, which might include design of a postal code".
Implementation
In February 1970, Communications Minister Eric Kierans announced that a six-character postal code would be introduced, beginning with a test in the City of Ottawa on 1 April 1971. Coding of Ottawa was followed by a provincial-level rollout of the system in Manitoba, and the system was gradually implemented in the rest of the country from 1972 to 1974. The rollout was marked by a large advertising campaign, costing some C$545,000.
The introduction of such a code system allowed Canada Post to easily speed up, as well as simplify, the flow of mail in the country. However, when the automated sorting system was initially conceived, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and other relevant unions objected to it, mainly because the wages of those who ran the new automated machines were much lower than those who had hand-sorted mail. The unions ended up staging job action and public information campaigns, with the message that they did not want people and business to use postal codes on their mail. 20 March 1974 was declared "boycott the postal code day" and the union promised that letters without postal codes would be given preferential service. Eventually the unions started being compensated once the automated system was put into use and eventually generating significant revenue for Canada Post. The boycott was called off in February 1976.
One 1975 Toronto ad generated controversy by showing a man writing a postal code on the bottom of a thonged woman with the ditty We're not 'stringing' you along/Use postal codes—you'll 'thing our 'thong'/Don't be cheeky—you've all got 'em/Please include them on the bottom. The ad ran only once before being accused of sexism by NDP MP John Rodriguez. Postmaster General Bryce Mackasey later apologized for it.
Components of a postal code
Forward sortation areas
A forward sortation area (FSA) is a geographical region in which all postal codes start with the same three characters. The first letter of an FSA code denotes a particular "postal district", which, outside of Quebec and Ontario, corresponds to an entire province or territory. Owing to Quebec's and Ontario's large populations, those two provinces have three and five postal districts respectively, and each has at least one urban area so populous that it has a dedicated postal district (" H " for Laval and Montréal, and " M " for Toronto). On the other hand, the populations in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories (NWT) are small enough that, even after Nunavut separated from NWT and became its own territory in 1999, they continue to share a postal district. The digit specifies if the FSA is urban or rural. A zero indicates a wide-area rural region, while all other digits indicate urban areas. The second letter represents a specific rural region, entire medium-sized city, or section of a major metropolitan area.
Map of Canadian postal districts A B C E G H J K L M N P R S T V X YA directory of FSAs is provided to the right, divided into separate articles by postal district. Individual FSA lists are in a tabular format, with the numbers (known as zones ) going across the table and the second letter going down the table. The FSA lists specify one representative community located within each rural FSA. Medium-sized cities may have one dedicated FSA, while larger cities have more than one FSA within their limits. For FSAs spanning more than one city, the city which is allocated the most codes in each such FSA is listed. For cities with a small number of FSAs (but more than one), the lists specify the relative location of each FSA in those cities. For cities with a large number of FSAs, applicable neighbourhoods and boroughs are specified.
Local delivery units
The last three characters denote a local delivery unit (LDU). An LDU denotes a specific single address or range of addresses, which can correspond to an entire small town, a significant part of a medium-sized town, a single side of a city block in larger cities, a single large building or a portion of a very large one, a single (large) institution such as a university or a hospital, or a business that receives large volumes of mail on a regular basis. LDUs ending in zero correspond to postal facilities, from post offices and small drugstore retail postal outlets all the way up to sortation plants. In urban areas, LDUs may be specific postal carriers' routes. In rural areas where direct door-to-door delivery is not available, an LDU can describe a set of post office boxes or a rural route. LDU 9Z9 is used exclusively for Business Reply Mail. In rural FSAs, the first two characters are usually assigned in alphanumerical order by the name of each community.
LDU 9Z0 refers to large regional distribution centre facilities, and is also used as a placeholder, appearing in some regional postmarks such as the "K0H 9Z0" on purely-local mail within the Kingston, Ontario area.
Number of possible postal codes
No postal code includes the letters D, F, I, O, Q, or U, as the OCR equipment used in automated sorting could easily confuse them with other letters and digits, especially when they are rendered as cursive handwriting. The letters W and Z are used, but are not currently used as the first letter. This scheme allows for a maximum 3,600 FSAs: with 2,
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