It’s official: NU wins postal code war

IQALUIT — The Standards Council of Canada has laid bare the debate over Nunavut’s two-letter postal code designation and has decided that “NU” is the code to go with and not “NT.”

Canada Post officials initially balked at the idea of a postal code that meant “naked” in French, fearing it might offend francophone Canadians, but it seems that fear has been laid to rest.

“Although that was originally a concern, it was found in the discussions that that was inaccurate and wasn’t really an issue,” said Standards Council spokesperson Dawn Pickering.

After some negotiations NU was the code settled upon for the post office and for other government organizations, she said.

However letter writers should hold off for now on using the new postal code if they want their mail to get to Nunavut as quickly as possible, Pickering said.

Because Canada Post is changing its equipment to cope with the year 2000 problem, the crown corporation will wait until the New Year to switch over to NU,

“In all likelihood letters will get there even if they use NT. It’s just that the automated system will not recognize them and they will end up in a pile of unknowns, where hopefully the Nunavut ones will be rescued.”

The Standards Council played an instrumental role in bringing government groups together to talk about which codes to use. Pickering said the code will not only be used by the post office, but by Statistics Canada, Revenue Canada and other levels of government as an identifying marker.

“This is an excellent example of the Standards Council fulfilling its mandate of promoting co-operation among private and public sector organizations,” bragged Industry Minister John Manley. Manley is also the minister responsible for the Standards Council.

The council consulted with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which has rules on codes representing countries or other geographical locations.

The ISO’s rules say that the code should be made up of either three letters and-or numerals long.

Canada uses two letter codes, like the U.S., and an agreement between the two countries says no two places can have the same, since there is so much traffic between the two postal systems..