It's a secret deal, the unseen plotting of a global cabal. Still under negotiation, it would subjugate nation-states utterly to the dictates of an insidious new world order. It exalts the corporate interest as absolute, defines profit as the only good, subordinates the democratic rights of citizens to the pestilent desires of a transnational corporate oligarchy. Move over, Trilateral Commission. Global conspiracy theorists have a new obsession: the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), now being hammered out among the 29 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Actually, the draft text of the agreement isn't nearly as exciting as all that. Mostly it just restates and enlarges upon established principles of international trade law, notably the rule of "national treatment": the idea that foreign companies investing in Canada should not ordinarily be subjected to different regulations than apply to domestic firms.

This seems innocuous enough -- unless you believe only foreigners should be prohibited, say, from dumping toxic wastes.

But that is to reckon without the paranoid enthusiasms of the economic and cultural nationalists, for whom the MAI has been the occasion for a sort of class reunion. Not since the glory days of the Canada-U.S. free trade negotiations (bliss was it in that dawn) have the nation's news media been so filled with prophecies of the apocalypse.

"The MAI amounts to a declaration of global corporate rule," warns Tony Clarke, formerly head of the Action Canada Network and now director of the vaguely militaristic-sounding Polaris Institute. "This agreement," writes the economist Marjorie Cohen, "threatens the rights and freedoms of people everywhere by granting extreme privileges to corporations." According to David Orchard, farmer and professional anti-free trade activist, the MAI "means elected governments in Canada agree in advance to place the interests of foreign investors first, regardless of the will of the population." And then there's Maude -- Maude Barlow, that is, chairman of the Council of Canadians and the fastest quote in the west. If Canada were deprived of the right to set different conditions on foreign investment, she claims, "it would be like the Third World." Well, no it wouldn't: Third World countries are notorious for the number and complexity of the restrictions they impose on foreign investors, which is part of the reason they're still in the Third World.

To be fair, the critics have not so flagrantly misrepresented the MAI as they did the free trade agreement -- possibly because none of their jeremiads about the FTA came to pass. The more usual tactic is simply to reel off a list of the things Canadian governments would be unable to do to foreign investors under various provisions of the agreement, as if the rectitation were proof enough of their undesirability.

Sure enough, the MAI would forbid the government of Canada from, for example, requiring foreign investors, as a condition of entry, to "achieve a given level of production, investment, manufacturing, sales, employment, [or] research and development in its its territory." But why would we want to do any of these things? Foreign direct investment, after all, involves a net transfer of capital from foreigners to Canadians. Do we really want to deprive Canadians of the benefits of that capital infusion merely because it does not pass some arbitrary political test?

The jobs we want are jobs that are justified on their own merits: jobs that represent the best use of our available labour and capital. If the only reason a firm hires a worker is to meet some foreign investment quota, chances are the worker is not really needed. Which means, aside from lower productivity, that the job lasts only as long as the provision is in force. With few exceptions, most of the prerogatives governments would be giving up under the MAI are things they shouldn't be doing anyway. Yes, even to be prevented from doing harmful things to yourself entails some sacrifice of national sovereignty. But so does any international agreement. It is no less a renunciation of sovereignty to give up tariffs on imported goods, which nowadays is uncontroversial, than it is to refrain from imposing special conditions on imported capital. Does this, by freeing corporations to compete with each other across national lines, amount to a declaration of corporate rule? Hardly. Critics of the market economy appear to believe that corporations must either be accountable to governments, or to no one at all. But the case for competitive markets is rather that they impose a different and arguably more rigorous kind of accountability: so long as consumers, shareholders and workers have choices, corporations must dance to their tune or face extinction.

We shall see which view prevails. "If there is even a sliver of truth in our claim," says Clarke, "then this should be a major topic of debate both inside and outside the legislatures of the OECD countries." Which may explain the relative public silence.