I’ve had a chance to befriend Larry Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education. He was the keynote speaker at the (under legal siege) Liberty Summer Seminar two years ago, and was at a FEE summer seminar that I attended this past summer.

We talked about Canada’s history of liberty in both cases. At the LSS, we talked about the 1837 Rebellions (the historical event from which we draw our name and inspiration here at The Volunteer), Louis Riel, Jean Chretien’s legacy of moving in the right direction, as well as every Canadian libertarian’s favourite prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier.

In the latest issue of The Freeman, Larry reserves his column to take a nice long look at Laurier. What he finds is a man worthy of respect and admiration.

Larry writes:

It’s not his tenure in government that makes Laurier an admirable figure. It’s what he stood for while he was there. He really meant it when he declared, “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality” and “Nothing will prevent me from continuing my task of preserving at all cost our civil liberty.”

He concludes:

I now keep a Canadian five-dollar bill in my wallet just for those occasions when I meet a Canadian and the conversation turns to politics. We will lament the caliber of more recent politicians on both sides of the border but at least I can now point to Laurier’s picture and say, “We can do better, and indeed, you have.”

You can read the rest here.