Leacock says no to late-night Parliament sessions

Central Kingstown MP, St. Clair Leacock says he will not be staying in Parliament until midnight Thursday, when lawmakers are expected to debate several laws, including one permitting the government to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars for a new hospital at Arnos Vale.

On July 18, Parliament began around 10 a.m. and ended just before 4 a.m. the following day, after some breaks, the longest of which was the two-hour luncheon interval.

And, on Monday, Leacock, who was acting as president of the opposition New Democratic Party, whose head, Opposition Leader Godwin Friday was overseas, made his position clear.

“… I’m not going to make this decision — but I’m telling you what I’m going to do for me, for me, me,” the NDP vice president said, suggesting that he was not deciding for the NDP’s parliamentary caucus.

“I will not sit in the Parliament beyond midnight to have a discussion and a debate on the subject with  Ralph Gonsalves. What the hell he wants to do with it, he can do with it,” said Leacock, who is into a third consecutive five-year term as an MP.

“The Parliament — and the colonialists who help to draw up the rule to the Parliament, clearly understood that Parliament is the people’s business and matters of the Parliament should take place within a reasonable time of day and into the evening,” he said.

“If you’re in the Parliament, 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, 11 o’clock, it’s time to go home. You can’t abuse the women in the Parliament who have to be there, who need to refresh themselves,” he said.

“You can’t be oblivious of how Senator [Shevern] John, our senator, who lives in Owia, gets home, or if she’s staying by friends nearby that she’s on the street at two and three o’clock in the night trying to get home in a very unsafe country like ours, by playing that you’re some macho person by being in Parliament 3:45 in the morning,” the opposition lawmaker further said.

“That’s nonsense. That’s rubbish. I wouldn’t accommodate that. And I would not advise my colleagues to, but they are free to do what they like. But I not.”

Leacock said Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves might deliberately “go late with this one,” adding that when the prime minister wants to “put a hook in we gill, he do it late in the night when people gone sleep and they can’t make the contribution that they want”.

‘pushing the limit of tolerance’

Leacock was echoing the view of his party leader, which Friday expressed toward the end of the Parliamentary session on July 19.

“… tonight’s exercise really is pushing the limit of tolerance,” the opposition leader said at 3:38 a.m., towards the end of the marathon session.

“Having this debate at three o’clock in the morning — 3:38 — where most of the members on this side of the house have left for valid reasons, half the members on the other side of the house are asleep, nobody is listening to us in the general public, and there’s absolutely no consideration for the staff of this honourable house,” Friday said.

“It is unconscionable. It really is a practice that should be discouraged. Who are we serving when nobody’s paying attention to the debate? … I don’t understand the rationale for it. And we sit here and we tolerate it, and as if somehow this is normal. It is abnormal. It is unconscionable, it is selfish, to be honest,” the opposition leader said.

‘This is not abnormal’

However, Gonsalves rejected Friday’s views, saying, “This is not abnormal. It is not selfish. It is absolutely necessary and desirable for this bill to have been passed.”

He said that without the passage of the supplementary budget, the government could not implement its programmes in response to the impact of Hurricane Beryl, which devastated the Southern Grenadines on July 1.

“The same thing in relation to the public sector loa., The other matter,  the overdraft, all of them connected to an important programme in relation to Beryl,” the prime minister said.

He said lawmakers should rein in the time spent on obituaries and congratulations, noting that two had taken two hours that session.

Gonsalves had also spent three hours making a ministerial statement and he defended this as necessary, noting that the government had opted not to declare a state of emergency in the storm-ravaged Grenadine islands.  

He said that his security team ensures that the staff of the House of Assembly get home safely.

“I do not believe that any member of the staff here, in my interactions with them, complain in this matter of national duty,” the prime minister said, adding that people were “trying to get a nap under the stars” in Union Island because of the damage to their homes.

“For my part, I think the Parliament, as a whole, did a very noble job today. And I want to thank everyone who has been involved and the speaker and the staff.”

However, Jomo Thomas, a former speaker of the House of Assembly under the Gonsalves’ Unity Labour Party administration, criticised the late-night Parliamentary sessions and the prime minister’s justification for them.

Thomas said that the supplementary budget was not like a faucet and that once it was passed the storm recovery would begin immediately.