Edmontonਐਡਮਿੰਟਨ

Edmonton is the capital city of Alberta, Canada, and home to one of the largest Sikh communities in the country. Sikhs have lived in Alberta since the early 1900s, Edmonton’s first gurdwaras opened in the 1970s and 1980s, and the 2021 census counted 41,385 Sikhs in the city, 4.15 per cent of its population. The community’s heart is the southeast, in Mill Woods and The Meadows, where some neighbourhoods are more than 30 per cent Sikh.

Where is Edmonton, and why do Punjabis live there?

Edmonton is a city in Alberta, Canada, on the North Saskatchewan River in the centre of the province. The 2021 census counted 1,010,899 people in the city and 1,418,118 in the metropolitan area around it. It is Alberta’s capital, the home of its legislature, and a working city built on government, health care, education, construction and the oil-rich province’s wider economy.

Punjabis came for the same reasons other Edmontonians did: work first, then family. The earliest Sikhs in Alberta worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway, in sawmills and on farms in the early 1900s. A much larger community formed from the 1960s onward, and once gurdwaras, Punjabi shops and family networks existed in the southeast of the city, new arrivals headed where help was already waiting. Edmonton now stands beside Calgary on the map of Punjabi places in Canada.

Pioneers in Alberta, and a park in Mill Woods

Sikhs have been making Alberta their home since the early 1900s, before Alberta became a province in 1905. One pioneer is remembered in Edmonton itself. Sohan Singh Bhullar came to Canada in 1900 from Punjab at the age of 18, moved to Alberta in 1907, and worked first as a farm labourer before securing farmland of his own. He lived and worked around Green Court, Noyes Crossing and Calahoo, and finally settled in Edmonton, where he lived until later life.

The ornamental park named Sohan Singh Bhullar Park in Mill Woods was opened in his memory in 1985, and the city renamed it in his full name in June 2013 so his story would not be lost among the hundreds of Edmontonians who now share his surname. It is a fitting marker: the neighbourhood around that park became, a century after his arrival, the centre of Punjabi Edmonton.

The first gurdwaras, 1976 to 1986

Sikhs came to Edmonton in larger numbers starting in the early 1960s, and by 1980 they had formed three institutions to meet their social and religious needs, running gurdwaras in rented or purchased buildings. In April 1976 the Nanaksar Gurdwara opened in Edmonton, at the same time as the first gurdwara in Calgary. It was first located at 4603 118 Avenue, and moved in 1996 to Horse Hill Road, where at 30,000 square feet on a 90 acre site it is described as the largest gurdwara in Alberta.

Mill Woods built its own institutions a few years later. The Ramgarhia Gursikh Society of Edmonton was registered with the Government of Alberta on 5 November 1982. Its first formal managing committee formed in March 1983, it rented a hall and held its first religious congregation on 10 April 1983, and after weekly congregations began it bought a site and built. The first Akhand Path Sahib was held on the gurdwara premises in April 1986, and the building has been extended since to its present size on Mill Woods Road East.

What do the census numbers say?

The 2021 census counted 41,385 Sikhs in the City of Edmonton, 4.15 per cent of the city, and 44,440 across the Edmonton metropolitan area, 3.18 per cent of the region. Together with Brampton, Surrey and Calgary, Edmonton is one of the four cities that together hold more than half of all Sikhs in Canada. Alberta as a whole counted 103,600 Sikhs in 2021.

The federal riding of Edmonton Mill Woods shows how concentrated the community is: the 2021 census counted 23,945 Sikhs there, 19.17 per cent of the riding. In The Meadows, in the city’s southeast, Sikhs form over 30 per cent of the population of the Silver Berry neighbourhood. Most of Edmonton’s Sikhs live in that southeast section, particularly The Meadows and Mill Woods, and the community grows around its gurdwaras because families want to stay connected to them.

Mill Woods, langar and the Nagar Kirtan

Mill Woods is Edmonton’s Punjabi district in the way a visitor can feel: gurdwaras on its main roads, Punjabi spoken in its shops and schools, and, on parade days, its streets filled with the Nagar Kirtan procession. Edmonton and Calgary both hold their Nagar Kirtan parades around the May long weekend, later than Vaisakhi itself because April weather on the Prairies is often too cold for a parade.

Seva, selfless service, is the community’s public face. The langar halls of Edmonton’s gurdwaras serve free vegetarian meals to anyone who walks in, Sikh or not, and their volunteers support food banks and city charities across Edmonton. That open-door kitchen, running since Guru Nanak’s time, is usually a newcomer’s first experience of the community, and often a non-Sikh neighbour’s first experience of it too.

Edmonton’s Punjabi community today

A century after the pioneers, Punjabi Edmontonians sit in the rooms where the city and province are run. Amarjeet Sohi became the first non-White mayor of Edmonton in 2021, and Sikhs have served in the Alberta Legislature for decades, as ministers as well as members. The community that began with railway, sawmill and farm work now works across the whole city, and its children study at the city’s universities and colleges.

For a visitor, the essential stops are the gurdwaras of Mill Woods and the Nanaksar Gurdwara on Horse Hill Road, and Sohan Singh Bhullar Park, where the pioneer story and the modern community meet in the same neighbourhood. Edmonton is one of the cities listed under Punjabi places in Canada.