– you'll 'thing our 'thong', Don't be cheeky – you've all got 'em Please include them on the bottom." 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. Canada was one of the last Western countries to implement a nationwide postal code system. Components of a postal code Forward sortation areas A forward sortation area (FSA) is a geographical region in which all postal codes start with the same three characters. 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); 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