Torontoਟੋਰਾਂਟੋ

Toronto is the capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada, and the historic gateway of the Punjabi community in eastern Canada. Ontario's first gurdwara opened on Pape Avenue in Toronto in April 1969, and the 2021 census counted 21,545 Sikhs in the city itself and 244,240 across the Toronto metropolitan area, one of the two largest Sikh communities in the country. Within the city, Punjabi Toronto is rooted in Rexdale in Etobicoke and Armadale in Scarborough.

Where is Toronto, and why do Punjabis live there?

Toronto is a city in Ontario, Canada, on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. The 2021 census counted 2,794,356 people in the city, 6,202,225 in its metropolitan area, and about 6.7 million in the Greater Toronto Area around it, which includes Mississauga, Brampton, Markham and Vaughan. It is Canada's financial and media capital, its busiest immigration gateway, and the city where most newcomers to Ontario first land.

That gateway role is the whole story of Punjabi Toronto. The city proper holds a modest share of the region's Sikhs, because from the 1970s onward most Punjabi families settled in the suburbs, in Malton in Mississauga and then in Brampton, where housing was cheaper and plots were bigger. But Toronto gave the community its first Ontario gurdwara, its first institutions and its parade route, and Rexdale, in the city's northwest, remains a Punjabi neighbourhood in its own right. See Punjabi places in Canada for the surrounding cities.

A small community, 1954 to 1969

Sikhs reached Ontario in numbers only in the 1950s, after immigration rules eased. The birthday of Guru Nanak Dev Ji was celebrated in Toronto for the first time in 1954, at a private home, and by 1965 there were about 400 Sikhs in the city, gathering for a monthly service at a community centre on Eglinton Avenue. Many of the earliest arrivals were students and professionals from India, East Africa and Britain.

Everything changed with the immigration reforms of the 1960s. The quota system was dropped in 1962 and a points system followed in 1967, and in the six years from 1964 to 1970 more Sikhs arrived in Canada than in the previous eighty years combined. Toronto's small congregation suddenly needed a permanent home of its own.

The Pape Gurdwara, Ontario's first

In April 1969, timed to the 500th anniversary of the birth of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the Shromani Sikh Society opened a gurdwara at 269 Pape Avenue, just south of Gerrard Street East. Heritage Toronto records it as the first gurdwara established in Toronto, and the Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada calls it the first in Ontario. The building had earlier been used as a horse stable.

Like first gurdwaras everywhere, Pape was far more than a prayer hall. It was the first address a new Sikh arrival in Ontario was given, a place to find a room, a job lead and people who spoke Punjabi. Students and families travelled in at weekends from Kitchener, Waterloo and even Kingston to connect with the community, and a Sikh neighbourhood grew around it, feeding into the shops and cinemas of Gerrard Street's Little India.

What do the census numbers say?

The 2021 census counted 21,545 Sikhs in the City of Toronto, 0.78 per cent of its population, a share that has been broadly stable since 1991. The city figure alone badly understates Toronto's weight in Punjabi Canada: across the Toronto census metropolitan area the census counted 244,240 Sikhs, 3.98 per cent of the region, the largest Sikh population of any metropolitan area in Canada by number, though Metro Vancouver has the higher share of its population.

India is woven through the city's immigration as a whole. Of Toronto's 1,286,140 immigrants in 2021, 102,155 were born in India, 7.9 per cent of all immigrants, the third largest country of origin after the Philippines and China. Many of those India-born Torontonians are Punjabi speakers who live, work and worship across the city and its suburbs rather than in one district.

Rexdale, Armadale and the Khalsa Day Parade

Within the city, Sikhs traditionally settled in Rexdale, in Etobicoke in the northwest, and in Armadale, in Scarborough in the east. Rexdale is the anchor: its gurdwaras, including the Sikh Spiritual Centre and the Rexdale Singh Sabha, serve a neighbourhood where Punjabi is heard in shops, schools and trucking yards, and where many families work in the airport and logistics economy just across the boundary in Mississauga.

Once a year the whole region's community pours through Rexdale. The Khalsa Day Parade, organized by the Ontario Gurdwaras Committee and held since 2009 on the first Sunday in May, starts at Sri Guru Singh Sabha in Malton, Mississauga, and ends at the Sikh Spiritual Centre in Toronto. It drew over 100,000 people in 2012 and 2013, and over 250,000 in 2018.

Toronto's Punjabi community today

Today Punjabi Toronto is best understood as the downtown and eastern half of a single GTA-wide community. The Pape Gurdwara still serves the east end more than fifty years after it opened, Rexdale's gurdwaras serve the northwest, Punjabi media and businesses are headquartered across the city, and April is marked across Ontario as Sikh Heritage Month, first proclaimed with celebrations at Queen's Park in Toronto in 2014.

For a visitor, the essential stops are the Pape Gurdwara at 269 Pape Avenue, the starting point of Sikh Ontario, and Rexdale on parade day in May, when the Khalsa Day procession arrives from Malton and the neighbourhood fills with nagar kirtan, hymns and free food stalls.