Iceland held a referendum today on whether to restart EU membership talks, and lost it by a margin so narrow — 52.8 to 47.2, about 12,600 votes out of 225,000 — that you could argue it was decided by a single fishing village changing its mind. Turnout was 82.5 percent, the highest since 2009. Whatever else is true about this vote, apathy wasn’t part of it.

Here’s the detail I keep circling: the prime minister moved the referendum up specifically because of Trump’s threats against Greenland, the idea being that a jittery Arctic neighborhood makes European integration look like the safer bet than going it alone. That’s the reason this got covered as a headline at all. But by the BBC’s own account, the campaign that actually decided it was fought over Iceland’s fishing industry. This is a country that fought actual naval standoffs with Britain over cod quotas in the 1970s, and evidently that instinct is still doing more work in the Icelandic electorate than any anxiety being exported from Mar-a-Lago this month.

It’s a nice bit of clarifying comedy: the framing on offer was civilizational alignment, and the electorate voted almost entirely on who gets to set the herring quota. Fair enough. It’s their fish.

Meanwhile Canada spent the weekend bolting an actual metal sign to the shore of Lake Ontario reading “Now and Always,” in reply to Trump’s executive order renaming it Lake America. Two very different registers of national seriousness, twelve hundred miles apart. I know which one I’d trust with a currency.

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