No one has done as much as Osgoode Hall law professor Gus Van Harten to educate Canadians about Harper's investment treaty with China. I’d call it a true public service. If it hadn't been for Van Harten's early articles in The Tyee, the Globe and Mail and other newspapers, it's doubtful there would have been as much of a political backlash to the unnecessary and highly dangerous corporate pact, or Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement with China, that Harper could ratify, without debate, at any moment.

It's now Halloween in Canada all year round. At every unexpected turn another grim apparition appears. The scream from one shock has barely faded when another ghastly spectre rises from the neo-conservative crypt of horrors to stalk the land, a headless, brainless zombie intent on political terrorism.

The faults of FIPPA

One great myth of the West during the post World War II and Cold War periods -- and for a number of years after the Cold War -- was that democracy and capitalism were intimately connected. 

Democracy, the myth went, happened where there was "free enterprise." Capitalism was either a pre-condition to free and democratic political institutions, or an inevitable and natural corollary of them. 

Well, 21st Century China has given the lie to that myth. 

Of course, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy -- where, in both cases, private business flourished in totalitarian states -- should have negated that Cold War myth even before it took hold. 

But those dictatorships were in the past, and easy to ignore.