Postal Code Conversion File [Canada], July 1996, Census of Canada 1991

The Postal Code Conversion File (PCCF) is a digital file which provides the correspondence between the six character code and Statistics Canada's standard geographical areas (e.g. Census divisions, Census subdivisions, Federal Electoral Districts) for which census data and other statistics are produced. To obtain the postal code conversion file or for questions, consult the DLI contact at your educational institution. The current version of the PCCF links over 787,000 postal code records, created up to the end of July 1996, to the geographical areas used in the 1991 Census and to Universal Transverse Mercator System (UTM) coordinates and latitude/longitude coordinates. This new version contains a new field called the single postal code indicator. This field will be useful in cases where a given postal code is assigned to multiple standard geographic areas. It indicates which of the standard geographic units is the most representative of the postal code. The purpose of the PCCF is to provide linkage capabilities that can be used for numerous applications, such as market research, demographic studies and geocoding applications. The file allows users to cross-reference geographic coordinates, census areas, and user-defined areas. For example, one of its key strengths lied in its capacity to integrate census data with user data. For more information on this product or some of its applications, please refer to the 'Products and Services Manual' or contact the Regional Geographer at one of our Regional Reference Centres across Canada. During the 1970s, there was an increasing demand for a large variety of statistics for small areas. To aggregate data by geographic areas, different types of address elements were examined manually, or by computer, in order to properly assign a geographical code. This assignment was complicated by the great variety of address formats on data files and spelling variations in street names. The introduction of the postal code in the mid-1970s has led to an entirely new approach. The postal code could be used as a structured representation of a range of mailing addresses. If the postal codes were matched to a standard geographic unit once, and the results retained in a lookup table, then the complex task of structuring and matching addresses could be avoided.