Canada

Canada has the second largest Sikh community in the world after India. Statistics Canada reports that 771,790 people gave their faith as Sikh in the 2021 census, which Al Jazeera puts at 2.1 percent of the population. Ontario has 300,435 and British Columbia 290,870; just under a third of Canada’s Sikhs live in the Toronto area and over a quarter in the Vancouver area, and more than two thirds were born elsewhere.

Key moments

• 1909 to 1951: the Khalsa Diwan Society was formed at Vancouver on 13 March 1909 and set up gurdwaras across British Columbia. It helped Indian immigrants win the municipal, provincial and federal vote in 1947 and, in 1951, an agreement that replaced the 1908 continuous-voyage rule with a quota, which ended in 1968 (the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism).
• 23 May 1914: the Komagata Maru reached Vancouver with 376 Indians aboard, all but 30 of them Sikhs. Only 22 who could prove Canadian domicile were allowed to land. After two months the ship left, and at Budge Budge near Calcutta on 29 September a clash killed 19 of the Sikh passengers.
• 23 June 1985: Air India Flight 182 was destroyed by a bomb, with about 329 people aboard (ThePrint).
• 6 April 2017 and 18 September 2022: Ontario’s motion on the 1984 killings and the Brampton referendum vote (see Brampton).
• 18 June 2023: Hardeep Singh Nijjar, president of Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, was shot dead in the car park. On 18 September Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons that Canada held credible intelligence linking agents of the Indian government to the killing; India denies involvement (Global News).
• April 2026: the World Sikh Organization of Canada released Understanding and Addressing Anti-Sikh Hate, based on a survey of over 1,600 Sikh Canadians. It reports that a majority had experienced hate and that more than 70 percent of victims did not report it (Frequency News).

What it means today. Sikhs in Canada are a large, settled community whose public voice grew out of fights for entry and the vote. It now argues over how Canada treats events in Punjab, and over violence against Canadian Sikhs. The referendum turnout figures are organisers’ estimates, and the sources opened do not show how Canadian Sikhs divide on Khalistan.