A Canadian postal code is a string of six characters that form part of a postal address in Canada. Like British postcodes, Canada's postal codes are alphanumeric. Most other postal and ZIP code systems use only numbers. Canadian postal codes are in the format of ANA NAN, where A is a letter of the alphabet, and N is a digit, with a required space separating the third and fourth characters. An example is K1A 0B1, which is for Canada Post's Ottawa headquarters.
Canada Post provides a free postal code look-up tool on its website, and also sells off-line postal code look-up tools in the forms of hard-copy directories and CD-ROMs.
History
Postal codes were introduced in Canada in 1971 with the advent of automated sorting, and replaced postal zones in large cities. The use of automated sorting processes, and thus the need for postal codes, became necessary because of the large and constantly growing volumes of mail that postal workers in Canada were handling per year. The introduction of such a system allowed Canada Post to speed up, as well as simplify, the flow of mail in the country. However, when the automated sortation system was initially conceived, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, as well as other relevant unions, objected to it, as it would render superfluous the jobs of many postal employees who hand-sorted mail as their primary task. 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 until the unions started being compensated once the automated system was put into use and eventually generating significant revenue for Canada Post.
Components of a postal code
Forward sortation areas
| ┌─ Postal district
|
| K1A
| 0B1
|
Forward
Sortation Area
| Local Delivery
Unit
|
A forward sortation area (FSA) is an entity denoted by the first three characters of any Canadian postal code. The first letter of an FSA determines its "postal district", which covers a major geographic region or metropolitan centre. Outside of Quebec and Ontario, postal districts cover whole provinces and territories. Quebec has three postal districts, while Ontario has five, because of the large sizes of those two provinces' populations. Nunavut and the Northwest Territories share a postal district. Canada Post decided not to give Nunavut its own postal district when the territory was created in 1999, simply because of its relatively small population. The digit in an FSA specifies if the area is urban or rural. A digit of zero indicates a wide-area rural region, while all other digits indicate urban areas. The second letter of an FSA represents a specific rural region, entire medium-sized city, or section of a major metropolitan area.
A directory of FSAs is provided here, 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 that span 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
A local delivery unit (LDU) is the name given to the last three characters of a postal code. 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 even a portion of a very large one), a single (large) institution such as a university or a hospital, or any business that receives large volumes of mail on a regular basis. LDUs ending in zero always correspond to post offices. 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 . One particular LDU, "9Z9", is used exclusively for Business Reply Mail. In rural FSAs, the first two characters of an LDU are usually assigned in alphanumerical order by the name of each community.
Local delivery unit lists are not provided here, as LDUs are always being added, changed, or deleted at one-month intervals, and as Canada Post already has a page on its website that provides the same function as such lists.
How many postal codes are possible?
Because of the use of OCR technology in Canada Post's overall mail-sorting process, the letters D, F, I, O, Q, and U are not used in postal codes, due to their visual similarities to other letters and digits, especially when rendered as cursive handwriting. The letters W and Z are used in postal codes, but are not used as the first letter of any postal code at the present time. This scheme allows for an upper limit of 3,600 FSAs, and with 2,000 possible LDUs in each FSA, this allows for a theoretical maximum of 7.2 million possible postal codes. The practical maximum is a bit lower, as Canada Post reserves some FSAs for special functions, such as for test or promotional purposes, as well as for sorting mail bound for destinations outside Canada.
Currently, according to Statistics Canada, only about 840,000 postal codes are in actual use in Canada.
Postal barcodes
Upon reaching the first major Canada Post sortation facility, the postal code on a piece of mail is changed into a barcode, which is printed usually on the lower-right corner of the faced envelope. For regular-size pieces of mail, a UV-fluorescent barcode is applied, while for larger envelopes, a special four-state barcode known as PostBar is used, which encodes additional relevant information along with the destination postal code. The complexity of the symbologies used do not make pre-printing of the barcodes practical. Not all pieces of mail are barcoded, since a fraction of the mail that comes into the Canadian postal system is already sorted.
Urbanization
Urbanization is the name given by Canada Post to the process where a community with a rural postal code (i.e., a code with a zero in its FSA) has that code replaced with urban postal codes. The rural postal code can then be assigned to another community, or retired altogether. Canada Post decides when to urbanize a certain community when its population reaches a certain pre-chosen level.
Santa Claus
In 1974, staff at Canada Post's Montreal office were noticing a considerable amount of letters addressed to Santa Claus coming into the postal system, and those letters were being treated as undeliverable. Since those employees did not want to fathom those writing the letters, mostly young children, being disappointed at the lack of responses, they started answering the letters themselves. The amount of mail sent to Santa Claus increased every Christmas, up to the point that Canada Post decided to start an official Santa Claus letter-response program in 1983. Approximately one million letters come in to Santa Claus each Christmas from many people, even those living outside of Canada, and all of them are answered, in the same languages they are written in.
Canada Post commissioned a special address for mail to Santa Claus, complete with its own dedicated postal code:
SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE H0H 0H0
CANADA
H0H 0H0 was chosen simply because it looks like "Ho, ho, ho".
While the geographic North Pole is not located in Canada per se, the boundaries of Canada extend northward to it and converge at it.
References
