Rajesh Sharma, 39, immigrated to Canada from Delhi two years ago with his wife and daughter, because, he says, “ample opportunities are here.”

“It’s a good education system for the kids, a safe environment,” he says. “The crime rate is low.”

As to why he chose Brampton — where he now co-owns Kama Classical Indian Cuisine — he says simply, “You have to go somewhere that’s within your budget.”

Many have made the same calculation. Statistics Canada released census data yesterday showing Brampton grew a staggering 33.3% in the past five years, going from 325,428 people to 433,806. The much smaller Milton, Brampton’s neighbour to the west, grew even more quickly, by 71%.

Thirty years ago Brampton was a farm town and a flower-growing capital, but today Adrian Smith, Brampton’s director of planning, can’t even say how many farms are left.

“All the municipality is designated urban,” he says. “We estimate we will have 700,000 people by 2031.”

Subdivisions of two-storey detached brick bungalows, which all seem to look the same, sprout so quickly around here that, jokes Gail Bursey, who works for public health in the Region of Peel (which includes Brampton), “You drive one way and on the way back you see new houses.”

For many years Mississauga, Brampton’s giant suburban neighbour to the south, was the fastest-growing place around, but at 668,549 people (according to the new census numbers)Mississauga

has almost no farmland left to pave. (Mississauga grew 9.1% in the past five years, which is the Toronto census metropolitan area average).

So now people move to Brampton, from both overseas and elsewhere in Ontario, because, simply put, they can buy bigger homes for less than elsewhere.

“There’s a lot of green space,” adds Cathy Granger, another public health staffer, who moved here from Toronto 13 years ago with her husband and children. “There are a lot of farms right down the road.”

The town is also opening a new indoor soccer facility in north Brampton, planned as a hockey rink until the community asked for soccer instead, she said.

Public facilities are struggling to keep up with the breakneck pace of growth here.

Just down the six-lane street from Kama, workers are busy completing work on a vast new $550-million hospital with a six storey parking garage.

Brampton Civic Hospital opens this fall, but the community is already complaining that the province and Ottawa are inadequately funding the new facility.

The hospital has room for 608 beds but, at first anyway, it appears the local hospital corporation will merely transfer the 350 beds currently at Peel Memorial, the existing hospital in downtown Brampton, which they will close down.

“A working group has been struck,” to see how many beds the new hospital will have, says Terry O’Donovan, a hospital spokesman.

“You know what the nursing shortage is like,” adds Dawn Dunn, another hospital spokeswoman. “We’ve been trying to get a new hospital for 35 years. This is great news.”

But Raffick Ali, 77, who moved to Brampton 18 months ago from Hamilton (to be closer to his six daughters), is unimpressed. “They don’t have the doctors, the nurses, the workers,” he says.

“You have a building that you go and put all this money into. For what? To look at? You have to fill it.”

Mr. Smith, Brampton’s planner, says the town has capped expansion at 5,500 units a year. “By putting that cap in place, council is in the driver’s seat,” he says, but Mr. Ali is nonplussed: “Every day you go by, you see more houses.”

Back at Kama, India’s goddess of love strikes various suggestive poses in plaster replicas of erotic Indian sculpture that decorate the walls.

The sweet smell of daal and vegetable pakoras fill the air. And for Mr. Sharma, the future looks bright.

“It’s should grow,” he says of Brampton. “There’s no such thing as growing too fast. The pace has to be there in this world.”

Pkuitenbrouwer@nationalpost.com

source : www.canada.com