Glenn Carrott, former Innisfail councillor and organizer of the February 2019 United We Roll convoy, resigned in protest over pandemic lockdowns that crushed small businesses like Natalie’s Blades to Fades barbershop while allowing BLM rallies. He accuses Alberta’s government of failing to prioritize local economies—spending $50M daily on foreign oil despite holding the world’s third-largest reserves—and criticizes Premier Kenney for perceived political posturing over real action. Carrott’s mayoral bid centers on open governance, small business advocacy, and rejecting external criticism, arguing Innisfail’s leadership should champion—not shame—their community. His campaign aims to shift focus from studies to local voices, like minor hockey groups, while pushing back against pandemic restrictions and property tax burdens. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
However, as you know, this is the internet, so you know what?
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Tonight, my guest is Glenn Carrot from United We Roll, but he's also, as some of you may not know, a town councilor in Innisfail, Alberta.
Actually, I guess now he's a former town councilor, and he'll tell you how that came to be.
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A small-town Alberta town councillor resigns in protest of the lockdown restrictions on small businesses.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Supporting Small Town Business00:14:06
You're coming to speak at the protest.
Why is it important to have this protest here in Innisfail?
Well, I'm not sure if I'm actually going to be speaking per se.
It's just to support other counselors that have a message to get out there and support the anti-racism.
Can you give me an example of racism here?
Examples?
I personally have seen, like, I have some close friends that they've exhibited, you know, whether they are black or of another culture, just being uncomfortable.
You know, you go to some of these soccer games, you go to hockey games, you go to any public event, and there is that level of just feeling a little bit less comfortable.
And I really want Innisfail to make everyone feel comfortable.
Are you from Innisfail?
I'm not.
I'm from Calgary.
Okay, drove in for the party.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Could you give me an example of police brutality in Innisfail?
I'm actually not going to talk to any media today.
I'm sorry.
That's just not something.
There's lots of media and people talking to media over there.
As far as my quote on anything, I'm not going to give one.
You're at a protest.
What's your point here, if not to spread your message?
I'm here to show support.
That's all.
To stop police brutality in the town of Innisfail with 7,000 people.
To stop police brutality in general.
Are you here to support the rally?
Yes.
Okay.
Would you be able to give me any examples of the racist piece of shit?
Get the f ⁇ out of here, you f ⁇ ing foxy.
What you just saw there was part of a larger report done by my friend and colleague, Kian Bexte.
Actually, it was one of our most popular videos of 2020.
And why was that?
Especially when it's about small town Innisfail, Alberta.
Well, it really struck a chord.
You see, outside BLM activists from Calgary and Edmonton were bussed into little tiny Innisfail, about an hour north of Calgary, to stage a rally there.
Now, there was no particular inciting incident of racism that would prompt BLM to rally in that small oil patch and farming community.
Instead, it was urban left-wing activists and their own prejudice toward anyone who lives outside of large city centers that prompted the rally.
And at the time, and as Kian pointed out in his reporting, this slander and libel against the good people of Innisfail went largely unopposed by the leadership on Innisfail's town council.
And that includes the mayor, except for one man, a familiar face to rebel viewers.
Now, many of you know, and if you're like me, you appreciate the work of Glenn Carrott as one of the lead organizers of United We Roll.
You see, Glenn is an Innisfail businessman who led the convoy of truckers all the way across the prairies, all the way across the middle part of the country and all the way to Ottawa to try to get the Liberal government to listen to what's happening here in Alberta.
Job losses, suicides, foreclosures, divorces, bankruptcies, all because we have a government in Ottawa that hates oil and gas.
But not only is Glenn an activist and a businessman, he's also a town councilor in Innisfail, Alberta, and he has been outspoken against the lockdown restrictions meant to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
Glenn says these restrictions are damaging to the economy, but they're also damaging to people psychologically and emotionally.
Glenn has been advocating for small businesses like Blades to Fades barbershop, run, in fact, by former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein's own niece, Natalie.
Well, Glenn has been advocating for those places to open their doors in the face of expensive lockdown fines after the government has just shuttered them.
And because of Glenn's support for small businesses, Glenn has faced such incredible pushback from his fellow counselors and the mayor.
I ran into Glenn at that barbershop I mentioned earlier, Blades to Fades, to talk about his recent resignation in protest from Innisfail Town Council and his newly launched campaign to be the mayor of Innisfail.
Take a listen.
We're here in Innisfil.
You.
You were, up until yesterday, a town councillor here in Innisfail.
And I'm kind of proud and excited to be the first person in the media to really speak to you about why you resigned from town council here.
Yeah, you know, I resigned because I stand behind small business and I don't expect anybody to do anything illegal.
And the problem here is that we have to choose between survival and illegal.
And I'm not the one that broke the law, but the rest of council felt like that I was supporting someone to break the law.
But that's not the case.
I was simply supporting a business to open.
And I do support that.
And I'll stand behind that 100%.
I feel that government is broken right now.
We have government that can't speak for the people.
If you say anything, then you're chastised and bullied.
And if you don't conform to everything that's being said, then you end up being forced out of a council.
And we've had a great council for the most part.
We've done a lot of great things for this town.
And we've done a lot of great work.
But it's unfortunate that we've had some social economic issues that have come up over the last year With Black Lives Matter rally and the pandemic and all this stuff that's come up.
And I posed the question last night that how come it's okay for the rest of council to support a Black Lives Matter rally and break all the rules and all the regulations that Alberta Health set out there.
Yet all I did was put a post on Facebook saying that I support a small business opening and I'm supposedly breaking the code of conduct.
I don't understand it.
If a government can't speak out for the people, then that's where the problem lies.
And I won't be involved in a council that doesn't support small business.
If they say they support this small business, then why didn't they get behind what I was saying, make a phone call and say, Glenn, we need to get together, we need to write a letter to the Premier to move in a different direction.
But no, they would rather go directly to the paper and start claiming that there's a code of conduct.
And that's not leadership.
That's not the way problem solving is completed.
And I feel like we've been divided as a council since the beginning of this pandemic.
And I'd like to be a leader to get this council back on target.
And, you know, we're hearing other municipalities speaking out.
Like, for example, Edson, their mayor has said that it is time to start reopening the economy.
And their council is sort of standing together.
But here in Innisfil, which seems strange to me, because Innisfil is a very conservative place.
And I think when you ran initially on council, it was on like a pro-small business platform.
Why the heck is what like what's going on with the Innisfail town council?
Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't understand it.
I do get that we need to work cohesively and we have to follow code of conduct.
I get that.
But if, again, if we can't support and say publicly that we support small businesses opening when it's a matter of survival, then we've got a problem with government.
And I don't understand where the disconnect comes with not getting behind opening up a small business.
And I know they all support that they want to have small business open.
So why not jump on board with somebody that's taken the initiative to help support the small business?
I realize that we don't want to condone illegal actions.
I get that.
But we're not.
We're just supporting a business.
They're making the choice on their own to do that.
To support somebody is not illegal, to have a livelihood.
So I know it's fine lines, but I'm going to stand behind small business any day of the week.
And come October, sorry, come October, the election will decide.
I'm going to continue to run for mayor.
And if the rest of the town sees my conviction and sees that I care about this community and that I will fight for you and I'll fight for oil and gas and I am a fighter, then that'll be determined.
And if I'm not successful, then I guess the people who spoke and our court and jury is the election.
Now, today we're here at Blades to Fades, and that's, I guess, what the dispute with town council grew out of was your support for this small business.
Let's look a little bit beyond what's happening in Innisfail.
You've been a strong advocate for small businesses.
Why do you think the provincial government is still so strong on these small business closures?
You know, I don't really know.
You can have a lot of speculation about what Premier Kenny's doing.
And I feel he's actually posturing himself for the big job in Ottawa.
And he's pandering to Ontario into the popularity of Doug Ford.
And that's another successful haircut.
And Alberta are hardworking people.
You just saw this gentleman come out of the hairdressing salon wearing a mask.
They're taking all the precautions.
They're opening.
They're working safely.
She's going to screen this next guy coming in.
They're doing everything.
They're following the rules.
There's zero cases in hairdressing salons.
These people have to survive.
They have to live.
And what people also don't understand, this building, it's got three businesses in it.
The guy that owns it, I know him personally.
And if they move out, he's lost a tenant.
And then what happens?
He can't find anybody to go in there, so then maybe he loses his building.
And we're in a big turmoil if we continue to go down this hole.
So I really need people to understand that there's a huge trickle-down effect with small business.
If one business loses, then everybody loses and they can't put food on the table.
And it's very important to keep these small businesses rolling, and they're taking the precautions to do so.
Let's talk about some of your other advocacy.
You first came on my radar with the United We Roll Convoy and the convoys that you planned all across Alberta and then all the way to Ottawa.
And now we have, or we're poised to have, I guess, a pretty anti-fossil fuel president in the White House should Joe Biden be inaugurated next week.
What do you think that means for us here in Alberta?
It's terrible.
Well, you know, actually, if people realized having Joe Biden in the States would actually help our oil and gas in Canada because he's against fracking and Biden would shut down a lot of the oil and gas and our supply would go up.
But we need to look at this as a whole holistic thing and as long as we have Prime Minister Trudeau in power, that doesn't matter because he's continuing to stifle our economy and our oil and gas and pandering to the Paris Agreements when we're the most environmentally friendly country with our oil exploration and our oil production in the world.
We don't need to be worrying about it.
We need to be leading by example and showing other countries that we are the best and getting our oil reserves, which is the third largest oil reserve in the world, back to work.
To this day, we still spend $50 million a day on foreign oil.
And we did the convoy in 2019, February 2019, and nothing's changed.
In fact, it's got worse.
And Premier Kenney came on board to try and get business back into Alberta, and there's been nothing.
We've in fact lost more business.
So what's happening?
Why are we losing our natural resources when the only thing that's going to happen is if we shut down Alberta oil is we're just going to continue to buy that $50 million a day is going to go to $60 million a day, $100 million a day of foreign oil because the world production of oil is going up.
So we have to get it from somewhere.
It just makes, I don't know why this makes so much sense to people that understand business but that other people can't see it.
Oil is not going anywhere.
You know, as you were talking about the convoy, it just occurred to me, Justin Trudeau, not just Justin Trudeau, but not a single Liberal MP came out to meet with you guys when you drove all the way from Alberta to Ottawa and yet they came out and knelt with Black Lives Matter in the middle of a pandemic.
Yeah, you know, the hypocrisy just does not make sense on the left.
And exactly.
He came out to support Black Lives Matter and the organization, the money is funded by the Democrat Party in the States and it's a problem.
But they won't come out and support hardworking oil and gas.
Developing Pro-Canada Policy00:06:26
And I kind of see the same hypocrisy with the council as they supported a Black Lives Matter rally in town here, but they don't seem to support a small town business.
And I just don't understand.
It's definitely been some division.
There's left and right division.
And we need a middle ground here and we need to figure out who the problem is and start fixing the problem.
You know, I think that middle ground is pro-Canada.
You know, it should be pro-Canada, not people who think that Canada is a terrible racist place.
And I think it was the same thing here in Innisfail.
When Black Lives Matter from Calgary invaded your small town, you had a town council that sided with, I guess, out-of-area interlopers who called your community racist.
And you had people on your own town council who agreed with that.
And I thought that was terrible because I don't think you want leadership who are not proud of their community.
Exactly.
I'm proud of our community.
We can always learn from racism.
We can always grow.
There's never a question with that.
We developed a new policy on town, which I was actually surprised that we didn't have.
My small business, I've got a racism policy, so we developed that.
But I don't understand how they can shame.
In fact, some councillors went on the radio and stated that they were ashamed of Innisfail.
Well, how can you be proud of your community when you actually say that you're ashamed of them?
And I don't think we have a racist community.
Again, do we need to learn?
Yes, but we don't need to be told that we're racist.
We're an accepting a community.
Now, you've decided to run for mayor.
You've alluded to that.
What are some of the key things that you want to focus on when you are running as mayor?
Well, I'm going to continue to obviously be an advocate for small business.
What we really need to look at is the way we govern and the way that if we have an issue that we should be able to speak out for it and our elections will decide whether people support that or not.
And I will also continue working with the user groups, the minor hockeys, the minor balls, and all the people in town that they're the ones that know the town.
I'm not the expert.
I rely on them because they're involved in it to tell me what they think the town should look like.
We need to stop thinking that we're the experts on all of these issues and start listening to the town.
Stop spending an enormous amount of money on studies and just listen to the town people about what's going on.
What's next for United We Roll?
What's next for small businesses here in central Alberta?
Well, we're going to see, you know, they've done now four successful haircuts here.
So, you know what?
It looks to me like things are rolling along.
They're open.
I don't know if they'll get fined or if they're just going to be opened up, but if anybody else wants our support to rally some troops to get them open and rolling, then I'll do that.
Whether it's in Innisfail, Red Deer, anywhere in Alberta, we'll get out there and we'll help get these businesses open that are following the regulations and can open safely.
If they can do it, then we need to get it open.
I believe all businesses should be open at a certain point, and that time is right now.
Yeah, no, I agree.
If you can take your dog for a haircut, certainly you can take your husband for one too.
Right, yeah, exactly.
And, you know, we all realize that we can't overwhelm the hospitals.
But the point is, this is not what's overwhelming the hospitals.
And if political staffers can travel freely, which they should be able to do, the problem shouldn't be them traveling.
The problem is that they don't see that everybody else can do things safely as well.
Glenn, you're shivering.
I'm shivering.
Thanks so much for talking to me, and I wish you the best of luck in your mayoral campaign.
I don't know who else is running, but personally, I think you're the best guy for the job.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
And I do appreciate Rebel Media.
And I know they tend to get a bad rap, but you know what?
I'll stand behind it.
Mainstream media is continually telling missed truths, and Rebel Media tells it like it is.
And I love it.
Thanks, Glenn.
If you watch regularly, you know I'm not one to endorse politicians.
But I tell you, I hope Glenn wins because not only is he a good and decent man, but he's a good advocate for Alberta's industries and a good advocate for small businesses.
And I'll go one step further.
He's willing to pay the personal price to do the right thing, as he's proven with United We Roll and now, as he's proven on town council.
Regular viewers of the show know that I am also constantly banging the drum to tell you that conservatives should absolutely be focused on municipal politics because those are the things that affect us first and affect us the most.
And we should know that the patchwork quilt of different ways municipalities have been dealing with the coronavirus, epidemic, pandemic, whatever they're calling it, is evidence that you need to have freedom-minded politicians on your town councils.
And furthermore, I hope Glenn also rounds up a slate of prospective freedom-minded town councilors to run with him because Glenn can't be the only guy advocating for freedom and small businesses in those council chambers.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for joining me for this, I don't know, I guess, relaxed fit, stretchy pants edition of The Gun Show.
I had to sort of put the gun show together today from the road while I was covering different rallies, different businesses reopening, and of course, different fight the finds stories from all over the map.
So thank you so much for your patience with me, and thank you, everybody in the office, for your patience with me this week as well.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, but maybe not the same place next week.