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GLASGOW, SCOTLAND: The old Scotsman handing out leaflets isn’t very official-looking. Neither are the leaflets. Stubbly and wearing a ball cap and shorts, the sort-of-campaigner gets knocked around by shopping bags that teenagers swing along the street. His campaign materials, cut with scissors and punctuated with urgent italics and suspenseful ellipses, beg Scots to “just think”: “Isn’t it important to make your Scotland … a normal country?”

“Normal” is relative, though, and an independent Scotland could help make democratic reform the new normal.

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While the self-made pamphleteer on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street isn’t official, he isn’t alone: ordinary — normal — Scottish people are plastering their city’s tenement windows with YES signs printed on sheets of lined paper, on magazine covers, on anything to which ink will stick.

Meanwhile, searching for NO signs has become the Where’s Waldo? of Glasgow. (I hear they exist. I believe they exist. I. Just. Can’t. Find. Them.) In Scotland, of course, the Yes campaign is the rallying cry for separation, but across the water in Canada, France and Spain, the Yes campaign is the “Yes, but how would Scottish separation affect us?” crisis. Badly, we think — it would affect us very, very badly. The political scorcher of Scottish independence, some fear, could reignite the embers of our own separatist movements. But in Canada’s panic-induced myopia, we’re blinded to another selfish and hypothetical concern. Separation, if it occurs, will spark an intense constitutional conversation in Scotland that could light a fire under our own.