this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Bit of a sidenote, but when did the shorthand for Alberta become “Alta”? “AB” is right there and is shorter.
My mom has always written Alta when addressing mail. I wonder if it’s an older convention that’s still clinging on for some people. I’ve used AB my whole life.
That’s interesting if it’s an older convention. I don’t normally read Alberta-focused literature, so it comes up for me a lot less.
I'm in my mid 60's ... so back when I was growing up in Saskabush, in the pre-postal code era, almost every province was shortened to the first few letters of its name, ie: Alta, Sask, Man, Nfld, etc.
After the introduction of postal codes it changed to the two letter designation.
I’m familiar with the others, but the Alberta one stands out the most to me as odd. Still fascinating though.
It was the old form. Other than BC, the old postal short forms were 3 or 4 letters.
BC
Alta
Sask
Man
Ont
Que
NB
NS
PEI
Nfld
The 2-letter acronyms came up from the United States relatively recently.
The two letter designations came in the late 90's and are used by Canada Post in automated sorting.
I can find no history of Canada adopting this system from the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_postal_abbreviations_for_provinces_and_territories
The two-letter system was already in place in the United States mail system before the 80s.
It wouldn’t be the first time Canada adopted a US data standard to ease utilization of US made or standardized equipment.
Ok. Do you have proof Canada adopted it from the US?
As someone who sees MS Word forms regularly force Canadians to use Month/Day/Year formats which were never native to Canada and don’t meet the ISO standard either, I am inferring the impetus transition.
But truly, I old enough to recall many standards being harmonized in the early 90s in the wake of the North American free trade agreement.
Whether or not a digital archive document demonstrates that Canada Post intentionally harmonized to match the US is TBC.
But it is a verifiable fact that the two-letter standard for provinces and territories has not been commonly established in all federal regulations or data standards or in provincial and territorial data systems standards.
That is to say, it has not been formally adopted as by Canada or as the ‘Canadian data standard.’