Timeline of Sikhs in Canada

Who: Sikh pioneers, mostly men from Punjab, and the Canadian governments that first shut them out and later apologised.

What: The main dates, with the sources' differing figures where they differ.

• 1897: troops from Hong Kong and the Malay States pass through British Columbia after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and South Asian Canadian Heritage says their stories are believed to have started South Asian migration.
• 1902: Sikh soldiers of a Hong Kong regiment cross Canada on their way to Edward VII's coronation, reaching Victoria on the Empress of Japan and leaving Montreal on 14 June.
• 1903 and 1904: the first settlers arrive, about 30 men. By 1908 about 5,000 South Asians were in British Columbia, about 90 percent of them Sikh according to South Asian Canadian Heritage, and over 98 percent of the nearly 5,000 by 1907 according to Sandeep Singh Brar.
• 1904: Bhai Man Singh brings the Guru Granth Sahib to Canada (Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada).
• 1907: South Asians lose the vote in Vancouver, and by default the federal vote too, and the Sikh Heritage Museum says Sikhs were shut out of politics for the next forty years. Later that year, on 7 September, an Asiatic Exclusion League parade becomes a mob that attacks Chinatown and Japantown in Vancouver, days after the Bellingham attack across the border.
• 1908: on 8 January the Continuous Journey Regulation bars immigrants who do not come by a continuous journey from their homeland. The Sikh community rejects a plan to move it to British Honduras, and the gurdwara on West 2nd Avenue in Vancouver opens in January.
• 1911 and 1912: the Gur Sikh Temple at Abbotsford is completed in 1911 and opens in 1912, and Dr Sundar Singh leads a delegation to Ottawa asking for wives and children to be admitted. On 28 August 1912 Hardial Singh Atwal, the first Sikh born in Canada, is born.
• 1913: in October and November the Panama Maru passengers are held at Victoria and freed by Chief Justice Gordon Hunter.
• 1914: on 23 May the Komagata Maru reaches Vancouver with 376 passengers, and 22 are allowed to land, according to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism; the ship is forced out on 23 July. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, on 5 September Bela Singh fired into a funeral gathering at the Vancouver temple, wounding eight or nine and killing two, and on 21 October Mewa Singh shot the immigration agent William Hopkinson. Mewa Singh was executed on 11 January 1915, and about 400 Sikhs followed his body to the funeral pyre.
• 1919: the ban on bringing wives and children under eighteen is lifted, and the Paldi temple opens on 1 July.
• 1947: Wikipedia says all South Asians had the vote by 1947, forty years after 1907.
• 1985: on 23 June Air India Flight 182 is bombed, killing all 329 aboard, 268 of them Canadian, according to ThePrint.
• 2016: Wikipedia says the Prime Minister apologised in the House of Commons for the Komagata Maru on 18 May.
• 2021: the census counts 771,790 Sikhs (Statistics Canada).

Where: Canada, mainly British Columbia, in Vancouver, Victoria, Abbotsford and Paldi.

Why it mattered: Canada closed its door to Indians in 1908 without naming them, kept Sikh men apart from their wives and children until the ban was lifted in 1919, and withheld the vote until 1947. Sikhs built gurdwaras and took their case to the courts and the public, as the Komagata Maru passengers' supporters did in 1914.