Canada has indeed become a significant hub for drug trafficking, largely due to its strategic location and extensive transportation networks. The country serves as a transit point for drugs like fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine, which are often smuggled in from countries such as China, Mexico, and Colombia.

A major drug bust conducted in April 2021 broke up an Indo-Canadian trafficking network primarily based in Brampton, Ontario. Of the 28 arrested, the majority were India-born Punjabi men. Police seized $2.3 million worth of drugs including 10 kilograms of cocaine, eight kilograms of ketamine, three kilograms of heroin and 2.5 kilograms of opium. Additionally, 48 firearms and $730,000 in Canadian currency were seized as part of the bust.

Indo-Canadian organised crime is made up predominantly of young adults and teenagers of Indian ethnic, cultural and linguistic background. The 2004 RCMP British Columbia Annual Police Report ranked them third in terms of organisation and sophistication in British Columbia.

While a lot of the young men involved today in organised crime in Canada come from first-generation backgrounds, the majority are second and third-generation Punjabi-Canadians. The vast majority of gang-affiliated Indo-Canadians in Canada have Sikh ancestry and names.

Indo Canadian gang violence dates back to the early 1990s but garnered substantial media attention with the 1998 death of Bindy Johal. He was the “penultimate hero in Punjabi-Canadian gang lore”. He and rival Ron Dosanjh held a very public television dispute in which Dosanjh threatened to ‘put a bullet’ between Johal’s eyes. However, he never got the chance as he was shot and killed while driving down Kingsway Avenue in Burnaby, BC. In 2012 well-known Vancouver gangster Ranjit Singh Cheema, who ran a major drug-smuggling operation was gunned down in a drive-by shootout, at his parents’ home in East Vancouver. Cheema fought extradition to the U.S. for nearly 10 years after he was charged in 1998 with planning to bring 200 kilograms of heroin from Pakistan in a trade for 800 kg of cocaine with California-based Colombian drug traffickers — a deal that would have earned him between $12 and $14 million. Other known gangs are the Brothers Keepers founded by Gavinder Singh Grewal and Barinder "Shrek" Dhaliwal, the Dhaliwal Crime Family, Dhak-Duhre group, the Sanghera Crime Family, the Malli-Buttar group, Kang Crime Family founded by brothers Sameet Singh "Sam" Kang and Gary Singh Kang, the Manj Crime Group and several others

The Indo-Canadian or Punjabi Mafia is affiliated and consists of several groups which sometimes work together. These groups are still active and notorious in Vancouver. They have been linked to the Independent Soldiers (IS), Red Scorpions, Lotus Triads, Hells Angels, and the United Nations (UN) gang in Canada although several members of the Independent Soldiers can also be grouped as part of the mafia as well. According to Johal's former lieutenant Bal Buttar, Punjabi Mafia hitmen claimed contracts in B.C. They are responsible for dozens of murders in Canada in the 90s alone and the majority of those murders still remain unsolved.

So since the early 1990s, Indo-Canadian gang involvement has been a hot-button issue in Metro Vancouver. Some of the high-profile cases, such as the Dosanjh Brothers and Bindy Johal even inspired the Canadian film Beeba Boys (2015).

Recently, there have been several high-profile incidents involving Punjabi gangsters in Canada. For example, Abhijeet Kingra, a suspected member of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, was arrested for his involvement in a shooting incident at Punjabi singer AP Dhillon's home. Another notable figure is Goldy Brar, who was linked to the murder of Punjabi singer Sidhu Moosewala and has been involved in various criminal activities. These cases highlight the ongoing presence and influence of Punjabi gangsters in Canada's organised crime scene.

In their work on Indo-Canadian gangs in Drugs, and Violent Crime among Canadian Youth: Facts, Trends, Issues, and Implications for Teachers, Schools, and Policymakers (2006), Louis A. Pagliaro and Ann Marie Pagliaro of the University of Alberta’s Substance Abusology and Clinical Pharmacology Research Group, say that about 40 Indo-Canadian gangs were active in British Columbia at the time of the publication of their paper. The amount of guns that Indo-Canadian gangsters had was “astounding”. The root of the problem lay in the easy availability of drugs, British Columbia’s lax drug laws and a climate of permissiveness in the immigrant Sikhs’ social system.