South Asian Toronto

Early South Asian immigration to Canada, beginning around 1897 to 1908, was small and concentrated in British Columbia, mostly Sikh migrants. Canada moved quickly to shut this off: the 1908 Continuous Journey Regulation required immigrants to arrive via a direct, uninterrupted voyage from their country of origin — a rule with no direct shipping route from India that functioned as a de facto racial ban without naming race explicitly.

The Komagata Maru

The regulation's most infamous test came in 1914, when the steamship Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver harbour carrying 376 passengers from British India; only 24 were permitted to land, and after a two-month standoff the ship was forced back to India under naval escort. Under these restrictions, Canada's South Asian population fell to roughly 2,000 people and stayed marginal for decades — essentially absent from Toronto specifically until well into the 20th century.

The points system changes everything

The turning point was 1967, when Canada adopted a points-based immigration system that removed race and national origin as admission criteria. Toronto's South Asian population grew from a marginal presence in 1971 to about 5% of the city's population by 1991. Growth continued sharply: by the 2021 Census, the Toronto census metropolitan area counted 1,182,480 people reporting South Asian origins — 19.2% of the metro population. The community is far from monolithic, including a large Sri Lankan Tamil population that grew substantially from 1983 onward as civil war refugees settled in the city, making Toronto home to one of the largest Tamil populations outside South Asia.

Sources

• Parks Canada — The Komagata Maru Incident of 1914
• Statistics Canada — Portrait of the South Asian Populations in Canada