Brampton, Ontario, situated in the sprawling outer suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area, is in many ways your typical Canadian city: rows and rows of middle-class houses with verdant lawns line quiet streets, with strip-mall parking lots and big-box stores in between. That it has been for years a majority non-white city, with South Asians accounting for over half the population, speaks to the success of Canada’s classical immigration regime. For even as Brampton grew more ethnically diverse, its orderly if monotonous suburban social template remained the same, attesting to the motto of late Ontario Tory premier and Brampton legend Bill Davis: bland works.
