JosephC said "It's even worse than this. I don't live in the city of Brandon, I live in a rural municipality just outside Brandon.
I have a civic address, but Canada Post has assigned no postal code to this area. Instead, my mailing address, like many just outside Brandon, is a site and box number, with a Brandon Urban postal code starting with R7A.
Canada Post delivers to a community mailbox just down the street from me using that address.
Because my postal code now makes it look like I live in East Brandon and because my area has no actual postal code for its geography, it causes all kinds of fun with anything that uses postal codes to determine where you live.
Long story short, especially in Manitoba, it's really really tough to tell what postal code (and address) will get mail delivered to someone unless you ask.
If you send me mail to my civic address and the postal code Google suggests, I'll never get it. The only way to know my site and box and postal code is to ask me personally. It's a ridiculous system when Canada Post could just assign a postal code and use my civic address, but for some reason this is what we've got.
Edited by JosephC, 2023-08-01 09:20:11"
I think you have some misconceptions about what a postal code does and how it works.
It's true that in Canada every address has a postal code, but it's actually more complex than that.
Addresses can have many components, and what is considered "urban" vs "rural" differs. The postal code contains vital sorting and routing info but it may not necessarily reflect your physical address. It's rather a reflection of how Canada Post sorts and delivers your mail.
So, first urban vs rural. You can live in a rural area but have an urban postal code. This relates mostly to population density. While you might be rural because you live outside of the City of Brandon and in a rural municipality, if your area has lots of addresses Canada Post will convert the area to an urban postal code. This happens a lot.
Next, the first 3 characters is the Forward Sortation Area. It's the wide area that that mail is directed to before being fine sorted. In the case of a small town, the whole town can have the same FSA. Urban addresses assigned to Brandon begin with R7A, R7B and R7C, roughly corresponding to the east side, the west side and the northern part.
So if you live immediately to the east of Brandon in a relatively dense rural area, it makes sense that Canada Post assigns an R7A postal code to it. Remember, this is basically for them to do a rough sort to get the mail into the right general area. Your mail is getting sorted with other Brandon mail with an urban address.
Next, the last 3 digits are the Local Delivery Unit. This is where the fine sorting happens. In the city, it can refer to a specific block. It can also refer to a single building or large mail receiver. In more rural areas, it often refers to a grouping of mailboxes or a rural route. I would hazard that everyone that shares a superbox has the same LDU. Maybe even everyone in that cluster.
So now imagine the mail coming into a large sorting facility. Everything with LSA of R7A, R7B and R7C are grouped together as Brandon urban addresses and sent there to be fine sorted. The local unit then sorts those by LDU and sends them out, where they're delivered primarily by Canada Post employees to physical addresses or Superbox clusters.
Brandon addresses with a rural postal code would fall outside of this denser urban clusters. They are sorted the same way, but delivery is slightly different. Those are almost always done by private contractors. I'm not sure how it works except that I've seen in smaller communities the mailboxes are at the actual post office or similar building instead of superbox clusters nearer to the homes. That might ultimately be the difference between urban vs rural addresses (but I'm only guessing on that point - maybe someone with a rural address can tell me how they collect/receive their mail?)
So while the system sometimes has trouble with online ordering because the ordering systems themselves are biased, it's actually a pretty elegant system. It's not a case of "they don't have a postal code assigned", but actually that the postal code facilitates the sorting and delivery of mail based on location, population density, delivery method and type of personnel.