It was a totally bureaucratically driven process that was completely under the radar. But then in 1996 or 1997, there was an election, and it showed up in the campaign.
I don't know which of you here were running then, but I just don't envy the poor candidate who might have been asked--let's say by Maude Barlow--“So what do you think of the MAI?” The answer was probably, “The what?” I mean, what do you do?
The MAI quickly became a tar baby. So in fairness to my colleagues and friends at the foreign affairs and justice departments, while I know for a fact...because acting for the chamber and the Canadian Bar Association, where I was chair of the international section back in those years, we were urging Ms. Kinnear and her friends to push this forward. There was not a lot of take-up by governments of any stripe.
That was the first issue. But at that point, MAI, and anything to do with international investment, started to become a little bit of a tar baby, the fifth rail of electoral politics.
Then you got the Cancun fiasco, and that comes up. There was a lot of diversion. And finally, perhaps most importantly, you have two provinces, Alberta and Quebec—certainly Alberta, and I think Quebec as well—whose companies and business communities are probably among the two most outbound-oriented business communities. Think of the companies like Alcan, think of companies like Bell International--well, they're becoming a little less international right now--but think of companies like Hydro International—
