Had they not assigned their puppets in government to negotiate the deal?

Wasn't this the most far-reaching agreement ever, a "bill of rights" for corporations that would deprive national governments of any power to impose regulations of any kind? What more could a robber baron want?

Yet, three years later, the pact stands on the brink of collapse, after the 29 members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development voted last week to shelve the treaty for a six-month "period of assessment and consultation," diplomatese for "I think I'll go and have a lie-down, now, I feel a headache coming on." If there were any doubt that the agreement was in trouble, Canada's Trade Minister, Sergio Marchi, has proposed transferring negotations to the 132-member World Trade Organization, where you may be sure it will be talked to death.

Who killed the MAI? According to media legend, it was a small but plucky network of social activists around the globe, who used the power of the internet to raise a massive international backlash against the agreement. One of their names is Maude Barlow, the full-time "volunteer chairwoman" (how does she eat?) of the Council of Canadians and veteran anti-free trade campaigner. "We are at a turning point," she tells her supporters in speeches across the country. "We are rising up and saying no." It was Barlow's group that obtained a copy of the draft text of the MAI, way back in February of 1997, and immediately posted it on their web-site. With that, a worldwide campaign of hysteria and misrepresentation was born. By now, Barlow brags to reporters, "if a negotiator says something to someone over a glass of wine, we'll have it on the internet within an hour, all over the world." So governments simply folded, right? The people, united, will never be defeated, no? Well, not quite. The MAI was never as significant, for good or ill, as its critics pretend. It's not clear that it is dead, but if so, it is more from the modesty of its ambitions than any imperial overreach. And certainly it had very little to do with Maude Barlow.

Let's take each of these points in turn. Whatever you may have heard about the MAI, the truth is rather less exciting: little of what is new is significant, and little that is significant is new. To a greater or lesser extent, the principles it would enshrine are already the practice throughout the OECD, in part as a matter of domestic law, in part as a function of the 1600 bilateral treaties they have already signed between them. The MAI was really aimed at setting an example for the developing world, where capital really is treated shoddily.

What would the agreement mean? One, it would prohibit governments from discriminating against foreign investment, not only directly, but indirectly, via regulations that applied differently to foreigners than to domestic firms.

This is the principle of "national treatment," familiar to us from the Canada- U.S. free trade agreement, and it's hard to see what the objection could be.

Are we to suppose that Canada would prohibit multinational companies from dumping PCBs, but give the green light to indigenous polluters?

Far from scrapping all restrictions on capital, "national treatment" explicitly protects governments' right to regulate in the public interest, so long as foreign firms are treated no worse than our own. Indeed, one legitimate complaint Canadians might have about the MAI is that, in the application of its second principle, mandating compensation for the value of property expropriated by regulation, foreign firms are actually treated a little better than their homegrown competitors. The foreigners can appeal to an international tribunal. Canadian companies are left to the mercies of domestic law, where protection from regulatory "takings" is as yet uncertain.

But that's our fault, not the MAI's.

If that were all there were to it, the negotiators might have agreed by lunchtime. Where they ran into trouble was in too-clever attempts to carve out exceptions from these modest principles of fairplay. Everyone had a favourite "sensitive" sector, that had to be protected: culture, health care, the environment. Before long the "exceptions" had multiplied into the hundreds.

Canada alone brought 52 pages of exceptions to the table. And all of this was well before Maude's modem started heating up.

Indeed, one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the negotiations from the start was the Helms-Burton Act, a massive, not to say extra-territorial, restriction on international capital which the U.S., for reasons of internal politics, was determined to retain. The Council of Canadians may claim many things. But it's a bit much to claim credit for Sen. Jesse Helms.