Returning home from a morning coffee run, a Toronto resident abruptly stopped in his tracks after seeing two swastikas that were drawn in his neighbourhood in the Moss Park area last Saturday.

“I walk this way to work every morning,” resident James Breen told the Star. “It’s really shocking.”

Five days later, Breen says that one of the symbols is still in plain sight at an abandoned building on Richmond St. E. in between Ontario St. and Sherbourne Ave., Thursday morning.

The other swastika, which was drawn on a vehicle parked in a car dealership, has since been removed.

Steve Maguire, a spokesperson at the Downtown Ford dealership said that the incident was reported to police on the morning the vandalism was discovered.

Since then, police said that they haven’t received any reports of vandalism or mischief in the area.

“I feel that we’ve gotten a little bit complacent, thinking that things like this can’t happen in Toronto,” Breen continued. “We have to still keep fighting against those beliefs that are inherent being in this country.”

On the weekend of Nov. 13, anti-Semitic messages were drawn on the windows of the Mimico Centennial Library at 47 Station Rd. near Mimico Ave. and Royal York Rd.

Toronto Public Library media spokesperson, Ana-Maria Critchley told the Star that police had been notified, and that they were quickly removed.

Additional hate graffiti was spray painted in other locations in the community, she said.

“I never really thought I would have to write a statement such as this because I never really anticipated such a challenge would come to the public library in this great city,” City Librarian Vickery Bowles wrote in a statement.

Bowles went on to say that defacing the public library with messages of hate “would not be tolerated,” and that they “threaten” what a civil society stands for, and “everything a public library stands for.”

“The public library is a welcoming, inclusive public space that supports the social justice principles of equity and inclusion,” she said. “I will – indeed all of us at Toronto Public Library — will stand up against hate speech whenever it comes knocking at our door.”

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