TORONTO -- The seemingly benign decision to stick a Liberal Party lawn sign in her front yard has brought a new ritual to Marla Waltman Daschko's morning routine. Ms. Waltman Daschko walks around her Volkswagen Passat station wagon and peers underneath the chassis, searching for potentially deadly sabotage.

She is not alone, at least in parts of Toronto, when it comes to kneeling and peering at underbellies of cars usually seen only by mechanics. Last weekend, more than 30 Toronto residents awoke to find the brake lines on their cars severed, their telephone and cable television lines cut and political graffiti gouged into automobile paint and scrawled on their homes. The sole link among victims: a lawn sign promoting a Liberal candidate in the current federal election campaign.

The sabotage occurred in two leafy, upper-middle-class residential neighborhoods, where raccoons raiding garbage pails are normally a bigger concern than crime. The episodes have provoked bafflement, anger and defiance. They have also brought a tinge of nastiness to an election campaign short on drama.

Ms. Waltman Daschko briefly removed her lawn sign on Oct. 4 at the suggestion of the police after the first attacks, which occurred overnight on Oct. 3. But she put it back up before going to bed, she said, 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."