Mississaugaਮਿਸੀਸਾਗਾ

Mississauga is a city in Peel Region, Ontario, Canada, and one of the oldest homes of the Punjabi community in the Greater Toronto Area. Sikhs began settling in its Malton neighbourhood in the 1960s, the Ontario Khalsa Darbar on Dixie Road grew from a farmhouse in 1978 into one of the largest gurdwaras in Canada, and the 2021 census counted 24,505 Sikhs in the city, 3.44 per cent of its population, alongside 20,690 residents whose mother tongue is Punjabi.

Where is Mississauga, and why do Punjabis live there?

Mississauga sits on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario in Peel Region, directly west of Toronto, with Brampton to its north. The 2021 census counted 717,961 people in the city, making it the seventh most populous municipality in Canada and the second most populous in the Greater Toronto Area after Toronto itself. It is a young city in its present form: the Town of Mississauga was created in 1968 and it was reincorporated as a city in 1974.

Punjabis came for work and for each other. Toronto Pearson International Airport, Canada's busiest airport, stands in Malton in the city's northeast, and the airport, warehousing and trucking economy around it has employed generations of newcomers. Once Malton had Sikh families, a gurdwara and Punjabi shops, later arrivals headed straight there, and many who first landed in Malton later bought homes across Mississauga and neighbouring Brampton. India was the top place of birth among Mississauga's immigrants in 2021, with 61,260 India-born residents. See Punjabi places in Canada for the full map.

Malton, the neighbourhood that Punjabis call a pind

Malton is where Mississauga's Punjabi story begins. The Marvin Heights subdivision was built in the late 1950s, and by the 1960s Sikhs had started to settle there, close to the airport and the factories around it. Families who arrived in the early 1970s remember a small, tight community in which almost everyone knew someone from back home, and by the mid 1970s and into the 1980s Malton had become one of the hubs of the Sikh community in Ontario, with large numbers of Sikhs also arriving from Britain.

The settlement was dense enough that writers from the community half jokingly call Malton a pind, a Punjabi village, rather than a suburb. Its federal riding, Mississauga Malton, counted 13,945 Sikhs in the 2021 census, 12 per cent of its population, and Malton has sent a long line of Sikh Canadians to Parliament and the Ontario legislature. The Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada, founded in 2014, also has its home in Malton, recording the community's history for the whole country.

What do the census numbers say?

The 2021 census counted 24,505 Sikhs in Mississauga, 3.44 per cent of the city, a figure that has stayed broadly steady for three decades even as the city around it changed: it was 23,425 in 2001 and 23,995 in 2011. Punjabi was the mother tongue of 20,690 residents, 2.9 per cent of the city, making it one of Mississauga's most spoken non-official languages, behind only Urdu, Arabic, Mandarin and Polish.

Those citywide figures hide how concentrated the community is. Most of Mississauga's Sikhs live in the northeast, in and around Malton, where Sikhs form a far larger share of the local population than the city average. The pattern is the familiar one across Punjabi Canada: settle near the gurdwara and the airport jobs first, then spread across the city as families grow and incomes rise.

Ontario Khalsa Darbar, the Dixie Road Gurdwara

Mississauga's best known Sikh institution is the Ontario Khalsa Darbar at 7080 Dixie Road, usually called the Dixie Road Gurdwara. Ontario's Sikh community bought a 1.9 acre plot of farmland on the site in 1973, and the gurdwara officially started in 1978 in the farmhouse that stood there. The foundation of a permanent building was laid on 10 April 1982, the building was completed in 1988, and the 25,000 square foot gurdwara was officially inaugurated on 25 June 1989.

It kept growing with its congregation. More land was bought in 1993 and 1995, the complex had expanded to 110,000 square feet by 1997, and a 135 foot Nishan Sahib was installed in 1998. The Sikh Heritage Museum describes it as the largest and busiest gurdwara in Canada, and its Vaisakhi Nagar Kirtan in 2001 drew a crowd of nearly 120,000 people. Kiratpur Park, opened behind the gurdwara in 2022, gives families a place on Etobicoke Creek to scatter the ashes of their dead.

Malton's gurdwara and the Khalsa Day Parade

Malton's own gurdwara is Sri Guru Singh Sabha at 7280 Airport Road. Each spring it is the starting point of the GTA's Khalsa Day Parade, organized by the Ontario Gurdwaras Committee: since 2009 the parade has been held on the first Sunday in May, travelling from Malton across the city boundary to the Sikh Spiritual Centre in Toronto. More than 100,000 people took part in 2012 and 2013, and in 2018 the parade drew over 250,000 people, one of the largest Sikh gatherings in Canada.

Between the two gurdwaras, the pattern of Punjabi Mississauga is set: worship and langar in Malton and on Dixie Road, Punjabi spoken in the shops and schoolyards of the northeast, and a community that begins its biggest public celebration in Malton every spring.

Mississauga's Punjabi community today

Today Mississauga's Punjabis work across the airport economy, trucking and warehousing, health care, technology and the professions, and their children study at colleges and universities across the GTA. The community is smaller in share than Brampton's, but it is older, and its institutions, the Dixie Road Gurdwara, the Malton gurdwara and the heritage museum, serve Sikhs far beyond the city limits.

For a visitor, the essential stops are the Ontario Khalsa Darbar on Dixie Road, Sri Guru Singh Sabha in Malton, and, on the first Sunday in May, the Khalsa Day Parade route between them. Mississauga is one of the cities listed under Punjabi places in Canada.