The same Richmond Hill community was also targeted for distribution of the alt-right tabloid “Your Ward News” in 2017.

Two men behind the publication were found guilty of promoting hatred against women and Jews in January and are due for a sentence hearing April 26.

“it is very disturbing,” said West, who noted the community where the posters were installed is a peaceful, multicultural one. “We need to take this seriously because clearly, it is not acceptable.”

Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, says the community should be concerned.

“Posterings say ‘we're here’ and it's them testing the waters,” he said.

“It also gets their people doing a physical activity on their behalf and generates content to share online (eg. pics of the posters they put up, share articles about the reaction, etc.). On one hand they want a negative reaction. On the other hand, it demands a response from the community — demonstrating it's not acceptable. We work against hatred being made more normal and mainstream by speaking out against these kinds of displays in our community.

“But we can use these provocations as an opportunity to strengthen our values and norms against hate and racism together,” he added. “We encourage people to remove these posters whenever possible or, better yet, replace them with your own that say our neighbours they target are welcome here and their hate is not.”