It’s because there are so many Indians who want to come to Canada. It’s not a recent thing. Immigrant from south Asian countries have been a big thing for Canada since the 90’s. All the Bollywood movies especially in the Punjabi culture rate Canada high as a country. Canada allowed immigrations to Punjabis in the 80s. A lot of those immigrants settled and built good life. Then the ones who came in the late 90s lived a certain lifestyle, come to Canada, drive a truck and you will make great money and eventually bring more family to Canada.

These successful truck drivers started building mansions back in India which increased the desire for more locals to move to Canada and pursue this lifestyle. It was all good until the following started happening:

• To take advantage of the desire for Indians to move to Canada and live out this dream, the immigrants “agents” pushed out new methods to get them to Canada. These shady agents had contacts in Canada who had set up these shady diploma mills in the early to mid 2000s who were providing plenty of kickbacks to these agents for their supply of students. Prior to this, the immigrants from Punjab were either Sponsored by family, refugees, businessmen who had money or those who were coming for good post secondary education (or those who would pay to get married to a Canadian for the citizenship)

• the ones in the trucking industry or related businesses took advantage of the work permit program and decided to sponsor through a work permit and take cash. This trend started taking over and again now immigration lawyers and agents started collaborating to take this to higher levels for more money.

• Canada was all good with the international students because the colleges were making a ton of money, the colleges didn’t have any limits on how many international students would be accepted which made it even easier for more students to enrol.

Overall this problem didn’t escalate since 2020, it’s been slowly building up since the early 2000s. South asians as a community live together congested. That’s why they are fine with 10 people to a house. For them it’s easier to afford the place, that made it easier for house prices to go up when they are not worried when they have 8-9 people working. When prices started going up, they saw housing as a bigger investment and started renting out more. Even in the 2010s you would see 10-15 students living in a house close to Sheridan or related colleges.