A lot of Scottish-Canadians were glued to their TVs or computer screens Thursday as the historic independence referendum played out in their ancestral homeland.



And like their counterparts in Scotland, the reaction was a mix of heartbreak and relief as a decisive but not overwhelming majority voted to stay a part of the United Kingdom.



After a campaign that followed a script Canadians would recognize, results reported by BBC News found just over 55 per cent of the more than 3.6 million people who cast ballots opted to say No.



"I’m absolutely gutted,” Edinburgh-born Martin O’Hanlon, a union leader who lives in the Ottawa area, said via email to Yahoo Canada News.



“It’s a victory of fear over hope, and that’s so sad. A thousand years of Scottish kings, martyrs, poets and patriots are turning in their graves.



"I’m deeply proud of the many Scots on the Yes side who showed such courage and spirit, but I’m disgusted and embarrassed that, in the end, ‘Scotland the Brave’ was anything but."



Christine Woodcock of Brantford, Ont., a Scottish expat who runs Genealogy Tours of Scotland, was hoping for a Yes vote but praised the Scots’ exemplary display of democratic engagement, which saw voter turnout reach almost 85 per cent.



“While I do believe Scotland is well positioned to be independent, they will still come out of this with more say in managing their own affairs and in making their own decisions for the Scottish people,” she said. “In that respect it is still a win in my books.”



Yes supporter Don MacLachlan, a retired Vancouver newspaper executive and media consultant, said he was disappointed but not hurt by the result.



“I think I had read enough polls to think that they’re not going to win anyway,” he said. “Those are the kinds of things you have to accept.



“If the [Yes] vote had gone through I’d promised to wear my kilt to work tomorrow [Friday]. I guess I’ll just be there in a sports jacket and grey pants as usual.”



Not everyone is taking the result lying down.



“It’s fraud,” insisted Jock Campbell of Abbotsford, B.C., a native of Dundee, one of the few electoral districts where a majority voted Yes.



Campbell’s Facebook page includes images he and friends claim show ballots being mishandled during the counting process.



“The result clearly is flawed because we have video and photographic evidence of ballot papers which are on the wrong table, which are Yes ballot papers which are sitting on the No table,” said Campbell, who’s awaiting permanent-resident status so he can resume his career as a (wait for it) mechanical engineer.



“We have video evidence of a counter shifting and shuffling votes from the Yes to the No.”

[ Related: Scotland referendum: Voters say ‘No’ to independence from U.K. ]



You can count Allan MacLeod of Toronto as pleased with the outcome.



“I hope there will be a United Kingdom as long as the flag flies. I think everybody is better off,” he said as the No side took over the Yes votes.



The No side’s slim margin of victory surprised Leith Davis, director of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Scottish Studies.



“It’s not quite as close as I thought it was going to be, which is interesting,” she said.



Polling in the days leading up to Thursday’s vote suggested the No side had a slight lead but with some surveys showing a significant undecided vote, the result was up for grabs. Those undecideds appear to have bought into concerns Scotland’s economy could be damaged by separation.



“I think probably the shock and awe tactics, fear about finances, the economy, I think that had something to do with scaring people,” said Davis.



Add to that former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown’s emotional appeal to his fellow Scots to stay and Prime Minister David Cameron’s last-minute promise to devolve more powers to the Scottish parliament. Davis believes those factors may have influenced the “soft Yeses.”



The campaign followed an arc familiar to Canadians who lived through the 1995 Quebec referendum. After months of complacency, anti-independence forces had to mount a last-ditch effort to ensure a victory.



The result, though, was closer to the first Quebec referendum in 1980, which produced a near 60 per cent vote against sovereignty association, which led to a decade of attempts to bring the province into the new Constitution.



And now that the UK has dodged the independence bullet, many expect the same kind of effort aimed at Scotland.



Canadians on both sides of the vote agree that with almost half of Scots prepared to take the leap of faith into independence, the pressure will be on to make good on promises to give them more power over their affairs.



But like in Canada, this likely will become a complicated, frustrating process.



Woodcock noted a panicked Cameron had set this coming January as a target for tabling plans for further devolution. His minority Conservative government will also have to reopen the formula used for transfer payments to the four countries that make up the union.



“I think we will see Cameron move relatively quickly on devolution, just enough to satisfy moderate Scots and not too much to upset his constituency,” said O’Hanlon noting even some hardline members of Cameron’s caucus seem prepared to accept it.



But there’s evidence others are not, said MacLachlan.



“There’s a fair amount of resistance at Westminster to do any more for Scotland without doing more for England,” he said.



“At the same time that Cameron is talking about more devolution, the more powerful members of his party are saying over our dead bodies.”

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