TORONTO —  A suspicious package found at the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Campus in Vaughan Sept. 8 that resulted in an evacuation of the entire facility turned out to be a false alarm.

The campus, which houses the Schwartz/Reisman Centre, a daycare and preschool, and a community centre was evacuated just after noon when a suspicious package was discovered in a garbage can outside the building.

York Regional Police Const. Laura Nicolle explained that the evacuation was a safety precaution.

“Anytime we get a suspicious package call, we come to it with every possible safety precaution. We handle them as if they are very serious until we find out that they are not,” Nicolle said.

“The reason it was deemed suspicious was because it was emitting a kind of a beeping noise. It was a discarded medical monitor type of thing.”

She said the emergency response unit deployed a robot that is used for cautiously approaching a package to determine what the contents are and the package ended up being cleared by late afternoon.

According to a statement from the Lebovic campus, the children from the daycare and preschool were kept fed and entertained as parents were called to pick them up from the VIVA retirement residences on the northwest corner of Lebovic Drive. The Kimmel campus of the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto also shut down early.

“We apologize for the inconvenience caused, but our first priority was the safety of everyone on the campus,” the statement said.

Just before 4 p.m., the centre re-opened and evening programs went on as scheduled.