Members of a Sikh temple in Edmonton have been cleaning up after graffiti was painted on the walls of their building.
Gurdwara Siri Guru Singh Sabha spokesperson Gurcharn Singh Sangha said they found the writing, which included the words ‘Leave Canada’ along with a racist remark, around 8 a.m. Friday and have already started to clean it up.
“We don’t want that our youth especially look at it and get emotional or something like that. So we wanted to erase those,” he explained.
He said they had been in the community for 21 years and have not had any other problems.
“The community has been really good over the past years.”
Sangha said he understands that there have been lots of tensions around the world over the last week.
“I feel sorry for them actually they got emotional about this thing. I would still like to advise them don't get emotional. Yes bad things are happening and everyone is affected.
“We should learn about each other. Because there are different faiths, different religions, everything, different languages, everything is different. We should learn about and respect the values of each and every one.”
He also said that they have told the police about the incident and would review their security cameras.
“We still are quite careful. We have informed our staff here to be careful and look around.”
However, Sangha said he was still disappointed that it happened.
“We feel sorry for these kinds of things. It shouldn’t happen because we have to live together and we should live peacefully and we should respect each other.”
The incident comes just a few weeks after a mosque in Cold Lake was vandalized.
In October, 2014 Cold Lake residents worked together to clean up the vandalism after the words ‘Go Home and ‘Canada’ were spray-painted on the front on the mosque. The two front windows of the building were also broken.
With files from Nicole Weisberg
