Secession should never be taken casually

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes."

However, the Ottawa Citizen reports that Canadian Member of Parliament Justin Trudeau (son of the late Prime Minister) apparently did not get the memo.

On Sunday, Trudeau, a Montreal MP, told his Radio-Canada host: 

I always say, if at a certain point, I believe that Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper — that we were going against abortion, and we were going against gay marriage, and we were going backwards in 10,000 different ways — maybe I would think about making Quebec a country.

Naturally, this caused quite a furor north of Lake Erie. Commentators began describing Mr. Trudeau as immature and "narcissistic." One professor even stated that if he did not know that Mr. Trudeau had uttered those words, he would have thought it "the work of an adolescent."

Robert Asselin, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in Canada-Québec affairs, aptly restated what Thomas Jefferson wrote when he said, "Secession is a very grave action and you don’t even suggest it (as a possibility) because you don’t share certain beliefs or values of the government of the moment."

My willingness to consider secession is not because I disagree with President Obama and this Congress, or even because I also disagreed with President George W. Bush and the Congress at that time. My willingness to consider secession is the result of twenty years of frustration at the direction the United States government has taken under administrations and Congresses led by both parties. The system is fundamentally broken, but the liberty movement is not strong enough to turn it around at the national level. Thus, it becomes desirable, even prudent, to consider how our freedom can be restored at the state level -- within the Union if possible, outside the Union if necessary.