Cue the outrage—Mayor Olivia Chow wants Toronto to support Pride by boycotting Home Depot

Mayor Olivia Chow attended the Pride Toronto flag-raising ceremony earlier this week, where she addressed the festival’s recent loss or corporate sponsorship. “We’ve all seen the depressing news,” she said, before calling out a certain home supply mecca. “Don’t shop at Home Depot,” Chow told the crowd, encouraging members and allies of the LGBTQ community to “shop Canadian” by getting their patio furniture and power tools elsewhere.

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The mayor went on to highlight new municipal funding initiatives that will support Pride as well as other Toronto festivals. Of course, the big takeaway for some critics was: ideologue mayor betrays business community to satisfy radical communist gay agenda. One headline in the Toronto Sun read: “Chow’s hard left politics could cause city thousands of jobs.”

Meanwhile, the conservative lobby group Canada Proud suggested that Chow doesn’t care about the Canadians employed by Home Depot. It even went to the trouble of splicing together an Olivia Chow Dances At Pride supercut for Instagram, posting it with the caption: Should Toronto’s Mayor Olivia Chow spend less time dancing and do something about Toronto’s skyrocketing crime?

Who knew that the solution to a complex systemic issue was as simple as keeping our mayor’s toes from tapping? (Is this Toronto or the fictional town from Footloose?)

Just a theory here, but perhaps all of this outrage has more to do with contempt for a mayor who loudly supports the LGBTQ community than it does actual concern for the well-being of Home Depot employees. After all, Canadian politicians have been supporting boycotts on American companies and products for months in the face of Donald Trump’s tariffs. No right-wing commentators in Canada saw reason to lose it over that.

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Home Depot has yet to comment on the mayor’s suggested boycott. The company is currently trying to convince the city to let it build a new headquarters in the Port Lands area, so maybe there’s a mutually beneficial solution to be reached. In the meantime, someone might remind Home Depot of their demographic. Most lesbians love that store almost as much as Olivia Chow loves an artfully arranged feather boa.