Postal codes in Canada

Numbered postal zones were first used in Toronto in 1925.[5] Mail to a Toronto address in zone 5 would be addressed in this format:

37 Bloor Street West
Toronto 5, Ontario[6]

As of 1943, Toronto was divided into 14 zones, numbered from 1 to 15, except that 7 and 11 were unused, and there was a 2B zone.[7]

Postal zones were implemented in Montreal in 1944.[8]

By the early 1960s, other cities in Canada had been divided into postal zones, including Quebec, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver as well as Toronto and Montreal.[9] For example, an address in Vancouver would be addressed as:

804 Robson Street,
Vancouver 1, B.C.

In the late 1960s, however, the Post Office began implementing a three-digit zone number scheme in major cities to replace existing one- and two-digit zone numbers, starting in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.[10] For example, an address in Metropolitan Toronto would be addressed as:

1253 Bay Street
Toronto 185, Ontario[11]

Toronto's renumbering took effect 1 May 1969, accompanied by an advertising campaign under the slogan "Your number is up".[12] However, with impending plans for a national postal code system, Postmaster General Eric Kierans announced that the Post Office would begin cancelling the new three-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.[13]

As the largest Canadian cities grew in the 1950s and 1960s, the volume of mail passing through the country's postal system also grew, to billions of items by the 1950s and tens of billions of items by the mid-1960s. Consequently, it became progressively more difficult for employees who handsorted mail to memorize and keep track of all the individual letter-carrier routes within each city. New technology that allowed mail to be delivered faster also contributed to the pressure for these employees to properly sort the mail.

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".[14][15]

In December 1969, Communications Minister Eric Kierans announced that a six-character postal code would be introduced, superseding the three-digit zone system.[16] He later tabled a report in February 1970, entitled "A Canadian Public Address Postal Coding System", submitted by the firm of Samson, Belair, Simpson, Riddell Inc.[17]

The introduction of the postal code began with a test in Ottawa on 1 April 1971.[18] 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, although the nationwide use of the code by the end of 1974 was only 38.2 per cent.[19]

The introduction of such a code system allowed Canada Post to easily speed up and simplify the flow of mail in the country, with sorting machines being able to handle 26,640 objects an hour.[20]

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers objected to the automated sorting system mainly because the wages of those who ran the new automated machines were much lower than those who had hand-sorted mail.[21] 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.[22] The union declared 20 March 1975 National "Boycott the Postal Code" Day, also demanding a reduction in the work week from 40 to 30 hours.[23] The boycott was called off in February 1976 after a new collective agreement was signed with the Union.[24][25][26]

One 1975 advertisement in the Toronto magazine Byliner generated controversy by showing a man writing a postal code on the bottom of a thonged woman with the following 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."[27]

The advertisement was denounced as "sexist garbage" in the House of Commons by NDP MP John Rodriguez, prompting an apology from Postmaster General Bryce Mackasey.[27]

Canada was one of the last Western countries to implement a nationwide postal code system.[28]

A forward sortation area (FSA) is a geographical region in which all postal codes start with the same three characters.[29] The first letter of an FSA code denotes a particular "postal district", which, outside Quebec and Ontario, corresponds to an entire province or territory.

The large populations of both Quebec and Ontario cause both provinces to be subdivided into 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 the Montreal region, and "M" for Toronto). On the other hand, the low populations in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories (NWT) mean that even after Nunavut separated from the Northwest Territories and became its own territory in 1999, they continue to share a postal district.

The digit identifies the FSA as urban or rural. A zero indicates a wide-area rural region (or, in rare instances, a special-purpose code);[30][31] all other digits indicate urban areas. The second letter represents a specific rural region, an entire medium-sized city, or a section of a major metropolitan area. In the extreme case, some FSAs in downtown Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are assigned to individual buildings. Rural FSAs also vary widely in population, with the Northwest Territories' X0G covering only the hamlet of Fort Liard, but adjoining X0E covering every other community in the territory except Yellowknife.

A directory of FSAs is provided, 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 all communities covered by each rural FSA. Medium-sized cities may have one dedicated FSA; 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.

All Canadian postal codes are listed in the following links, organized by first letter.

A

B

C

E

G

H

J

K

L

M

N

P

R

S

T

V

X

Y

The last three characters denote a local delivery unit (LDU).[1] 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 franchised 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" which formerly appeared on purely local mail within the Kingston, Ontario, area.