Anti-semitic graffiti in Brooklyn. Photo: Yeshiva World News.

Racist graffiti scarred a pedestrian underpass along the pathway of the Chamberlain Bridge, in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, over the Chol Hamoed Passover Shabbat weekend, Canada’s Sun News reported.

The tags read “Deport N*****s” and “Hail [sic] Hitler” along with two swastikas in white paint on the cement wall.

Police were quoted as saying the vandalism will be investigated as a hate crime, while the city dispatched a cleaning crew to remove the graffiti.

Pedestrians quoted by Canada’s QMI Agency were aghast. “It’s the most terrible thing you could imagine seeing,” cyclist Damian Crawley, pulling a child in a bike trailer, told QMI. “The foundation of our country is built on something better than that.”

The spelling mistake on the graffiti, which included “Hail” instead of the German “Heil,” led many to say the work was by “kids.”

“That’s just kids with nothing better to do,” said Brian Patterson, a pedestrian who was walking by the site. “I know some places further south, it’s kind of serious, but I don’t think it exists here in Canada.”

Online, Chris E. Leroux, a Sun News ‘Top Commenter’ from the city, wrote, “I hate Ottawa Nazis.”

The pathway is en route to several Ottawan synagogues where observant Jews would have been walking to on the special Chol Hamoed Shabbat during the Passover holiday that ends Tuesday night. Representatives of those synagogues were unavailable for immediate comment on Sunday.