TORONTO (CUP)—Four students’ union election candidates who are also members of the Muslim Students’ Association at Ryerson University reported vandalism against their campaign posters around campus.
Vice-President of Education Nora Loreto said the actions appeared to be targeted against the members of the MSA.

“Posters get torn down in any election,” she said. “But this was systematic…they didn’t discriminate against who was running, but they were aiming it at a specific group.”

Some candidates have had to replace their missing posters up to four times.

Board of Directors candidate Fahad Nadeem said he thought the missing posters were a random occurrence at first, but was later surprised to see his replacement posters had vanished as well.

“I would notice that some of them were missing before I went to class,” he said. “When I came out of class some of them were missing again.”

Presidential candidate Muhammad Ali Jabbar said he was troubled by the vandalism. “The poster itself doesn’t matter but the mentality of the people definitely scares me,” he said. “There’s still a lot of Islamaphobia going around.”