What does Scotland know that the rest of the world doesn’t?

Exactly a year ago this coming week, Scotland’s former first minister, Alex Salmond, was sitting in The Caledonian restaurant in Toronto, talking about some big events on the 2017 horizon.

Salmond was worried that David Cameron, then the British prime minister, was fumbling the Brexit referendum campaign and that the U.K., running against the prevailing opinion in Scotland, would vote in June to leave the European Union.

After his Toronto stop, Salmond was headed to New York to promote his book and take a few pokes at presidential candidate Donald Trump — one of his favourite targets over the years. He said that the U.S. election was shaping up to be a fight between “sanity and insanity.”

“We have a legitimate interest, because, you know, a shaky finger on the nuclear button affects all of us,” Salmond said, defending what some might have seen as foreign intrusion into an American election.

Well, we know now, a year later, how both campaigns turned out. Trump won the election, Britain voted yes to Brexit and formally started the process to leave the EU this week. Meanwhile, Scotland’s legislature voted on Tuesday in favour of holding another independence referendum. Salmond’s fears, as well as his predictions, turned out to be on the mark.

Scotland, as the scene of dual resistance to Brexit and Trump, has made for some interesting — and hilarious — reading over the past year. The two lines of Scottish, contrarian scorn have occasionally merged around one event, such as when Trump declared back in January that he had been in Scotland the day before the Brexit referendum and predicted the result.

The misstatement (some might call it a “lie”) gave Scots an excuse to trot out what Trump had actually posted on Twitter — the day after the referendum in June.

“Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!” Trump said in tweet dated June 24, 2016.

Scotland did not vote in Brexit to “take their country back.” The majority of Scots, like their former first minister, want to stay in the EU. As for their antipathy to Trump, that revolves around a long-running dispute over a golf course he owns in Scotland and his fight to keep wind turbines away from it.

Beyond the fun and humour found in Scotland’s resistance to Trump, though, there may be something more serious going on. How is it that Scotland has remained resistant to the international, right-wing populism that’s infected the U.S. and Britain in recent years? In theory, Scotland should have been ripe for the trend.

It’s said that Brexit and the Trump victory were built out of economic despair and dismal prospects among people who once earned a good living in manufacturing and industry. Those conditions accurately capture much of Scotland over the past few decades — a country that was once the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution was not spared the decline either, and the downward-spiralling consequences.

And all those recent reports about the shrinking lifespan of middle-class men in the United States? Scotland’s average life-expectancy rates have been regularly well below those in the rest of Britain or North America since the 1980s, especially among men.

Yet the Scots have failed to embrace right-wing populism — they’ve turned leftward and outward, in exact opposition to the right/insular tilt of other aggrieved political movements. While Scottish nationalists don’t want to be a junior partner in the United Kingdom anymore, they’re keen to be a full partner in the EU and the international community. Their nationalism, they boast, isn’t built on fear of others.

Scotland, in short, tells us that right-wing populism isn’t the only answer to tumultuous change and economic disruption.

A couple of weeks ago, a thoughtful friend here in Canada was telling me that the same could be said of Cape Breton, which is often seen as a little bit of Scotland in this country. Cape Bretoners have also been buffeted by economic uncertainty over the past few decades and it hasn’t gone all alt-right in reply. The same could be said of Newfoundland, actually.

Brexit developments this week have focused Canadians’ attentions once again on our historic ties to Great Britain. But if we’re looking for ways to insulate this country from the angry populism that has fed Brexit — and Trump, for that matter — maybe the clues lie in Scotland.

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Scots like to say that they invented civilization. In this century, it could be that they’re inventing the antidote to right-wing populists.

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