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Politics in Canada turn ugly - and dangerous
By Ian Austen
Published: October 11, 2008
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TORONTO: The seemingly benign decision to stick a Liberal Party lawn sign in her front yard has brought an unnerving new ritual to Marla Waltman Daschko's daily routine. Every morning, she walks around her Volkswagen Passat station wagon and then peers underneath its chassis searching for signs of sabotage.

She is not alone, at least in parts of Toronto, when it comes to kneeling down and examining regions of cars that usually only mechanics see. Last weekend, Toronto residents woke to find the brake lines on their cars severed, their telephone and cable television lines cut, and political graffiti scratched into automobile paint and scrawled on their homes. The sole link between the victims: a lawn sign promoting a Liberal candidate in the current federal election.

The attacks came in two leafy, upper-middle-class residential neighborhoods, including Waltman Daschko's, where raccoons raiding garbage pails are normally a bigger concern than crime. While the sabotage led to only near-misses rather than any deaths or injuries, episodes have provoked a mixture of bafflement, anger and defiance. They have also brought an unwelcome tinge of nastiness to an election campaign that has been short on drama.

Waltman Daschko briefly removed her lawn sign last Saturday evening at the suggestion of the police after the first attacks, which occurred over Friday night and early that morning. But she stuck it back into a planter near the sidewalk before going to bed, partly after considering the history of her Jewish ancestors.

"Perhaps because it's the High Holidays, but I thought of my parents and my grandparents and what they went through to assert their faith," she said. "It's shocking that in Canada, in Toronto and in the 21st century that this could happen when all we're doing is supporting a very mainstream political party."
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The Toronto police have established a task force to investigate the attacks and visibly stepped up patrols in the two affected neighborhoods. (By Wednesday night, Waltman Daschko had received two visits from officers making sure that all was well.) But the force has offered no comment in public, or to victims, about who or what may be behind the attacks.

The incidents fit a distinctive pattern. The brake lines on the cars, some of which were parked on streets, were cut using a knife. The most distinctive, and peculiar, element is the graffiti. It generally takes the form of either the party's name or the name of a prominent Liberal politician - including the premier of Ontario, who is not involved in the current federal vote - followed by the word "Lies."

All of it was spray-painted in a tidy cursive script that looks like something posted as an example at the front of an elementary school classroom.

Around the corner from Waltman Daschko, Brent Johnston and Meredith Strong escaped the graffiti. But on Saturday, they discovered that their car had been sabotaged.

Near noon, Johnston jumped into their nine-month-old hatchback to pick up their children from a karate class. As he backed out of the driveway, warning lights flashed the word "STOP" on the dashboard, but the brake pedal did not work.

"It was very, very eerie," Johnston said. Some residual strength in the brakes and the car's lack of speed allowed him to safely bring it under control. Believing that there was a mechanical fault, Johnston switched to the family's other car and asked his wife to call the dealer. It was only after the dealer told her that she was the second customer to call with such a complaint that day that Strong looked at the passenger side of the car and found two large L's gouged into the doors.

Others had more terrifying experiences. Andrew Lane, who works for Carolyn Bennett, the Liberal candidate in the area, found he lacked brakes only when he neared a major cross street. He managed to stop but not without narrowly avoiding a collision with a bus.

Bennett, a former minister of health, found herself Saturday morning lending cellphones to supporters whose brake lines had been cut and driving them on errands after the reports of vandalism came into her campaign office.

During the 2006 election, Bennett won her seat in Parliament by a wide margin. While she has a relatively high profile, she does not have a reputation for highly partisan politics. Nor are any of her opponents particular firebrands.

The other series of attacks, which occurred late Saturday night and Sunday morning, targeted supporters of Gerard Kennedy, who is running in a similar area to the west of downtown. Both he and Bennett unsuccessfully campaigned to lead the Liberal Party, but that fact offers few apparent motives.

The rest continued here:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/09/ … oronto.php

I thought you guys didn't tolerate this sort of behavior in your politics.