KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent (CMC) — St. Vincent and the Grenadines Opposition Leader, Godwin Friday Tuesday said that the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Assembly “seems to be going backwards” with time constraints hindering debate at its meeting here.
Friday, as well as his St. Lucian, Grenadian counterparts and other opposition legislators, criticised the rushed manner in which the assembly was proceeding, one day before OECS leaders meet for their summit here.
He said he has attended all seven sessions of the OECS Assembly, which was meeting for the first time outside of his home in Antigua and Barbuda.
Friday recounted that during the first or second meeting in St. John’s, the then host prime minister welcomed the delegates “to the Antiguan parish of the OECS”.
“And the idea was that this is a process which was set in place by the Basseterre Treaty, and then the revised treaty that we are working towards an economic union,” Friday said, adding, however, he was wondering what the assembly was hoping to accomplish today.
He expressed gratitude to his St. Lucian and Grenadian counterparts, Allen Chastanet and Emmalin Pierre “for eventually bursting this stricture of time constraint that seems to have been put around this session so that we can have a fruitful discussion about things, maybe the bills, but also larger issues as to what is the role and function of this assembly”.
Friday recalled that during a previous sitting of the assembly, members debated a motion on the free movement of people within the OECS.
“And there was debate on the floor on the matter, and anybody who wished to speak rose and spoke about it,” he said.
“At the assembly today, there were prepared speeches by designated or selected members to present. And I didn’t feel as though there was no hierarchy within this chamber as to who was entitled to speak and who was not.”
The OECS assembly is made up of country delegations comprising government and opposition parliamentarians.
Friday said that at the OECS Assembly, national delegations put their differences aside “so that we could represent the broader interests of the OECS people and our own national interests in doing so”.
He noted that Dominica’s Prime Minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, speaking after Chastanet and Pierre, had mentioned the ideal of a unitary political union within the OECS.
Friday, however, said that he did not get a sense that this was what Chastanet was proposing.
“What he was saying is, ‘We have a meeting here today, what are we going to do with the time that we’re supposed to spend here?’”
During the sitting, the OECS authorised five bills to the sent to the St. Lucia-based OECS Authority for forwarding to the respective OECS parliaments for debate and passage into domestic law.
Friday said he had looked at the bills, adding, “it’s not just a matter that we love our brothers and sisters — which we do — in the other countries, but the whole idea is that this is supposed to help us to create the economic basis for improving living standards within the region for our people”.
He said that the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Parliament tend to give deference to regional legislation originating with the OECS or the larger regional bloc, CARICOM, “because this is done at a level of treaty, which is done between states.
“But we also do look at the implications of this legislation for our people,’ Friday said, adding, “but here we have here today this very important suite of legislation, and there is no real discussion”.
He said he was confident that the bills were discussed at the level of the heads of governments, adding that the OECS Assembly is “a good forum for us as opposition and government to say that these types of legislation, they go beyond individual choices or preferences as to how we develop our economy, how we institute social policies”.
The Vincentian opposition leader said that the laws coming out of the OECS affect the region as a whole “and everyone benefits or loses, depending on how we get it right or wrong.
“So, this is a place where you have government and opposition together, where these can be ventilated not necessarily as my honourable friend, the Prime Minister of Dominica, said, to go to the level of saying, if you pass it here as a legislation is binding on countries.
“That level of sovereignty we can consider as we get to that point, but at least, let’s have a deliberative process here. Let us define what this assembly accomplishes.”
He said that when he attended the sittings of the OECS Assembly some years ago, he did so knowing its “a talk shop, but I say it will lead to something better…
“It seems to be going backwards, because today we have the strictures of time constraints where we don’t get to even discuss any of the substantive legislation that is here, even in principle, where you say, ‘OK, these are the things that are going to affect us.’”
The bills that were debated included a uniform customs law, which means that goods can move freely within the OECS once the customs dues are paid at the initial point of entry.
Friday used the example of people travelling to St. Lucia via ferry to attend the jazz festival there, asking “can I take my car when I go there and drive around, rather than have to rent a vehicle?
“Can I leave it there and come back because now you don’t have to worry about the tariffs and all of that stuff. So whether you imported it in St Lucia, you imported it in St Vincent.”
He said these are the things that the sitting of the OECS Assembly should be trashing out so OECS nationals can “know what the common denominators are…
“If we have differences here, they’re not going to go away at the level of the national assembly, and certainly, when we come to explain it to our people, it’s better if we do it as a unified body — as government, the state, essentially explaining it and representing it to the people in our country, rather than it becoming a partisan issue, which it tends to do, if we are not all engaged in the process from the beginning, not just by being present in the assembly, but by shaping the agenda and taking part actively in the substantive work that the assembly does; not at a ceremonial level.
“It’s becoming one more ceremonial, as my friend suggests, and we have to reverse that if we are going to take the work of this assembly seriously,” Friday said, noting that it cannot be that the documents are not circulated because they are voluminous.
“They’re not more voluminous than the documents that we have in our parliament here, and we have electronic means and so forth, and we can print them – whether it’s the government does it, or I do it in my office of Leader of the Opposition.”
He said that the work of the assembly has to be taken serious, adding that he was glad that Tuesday’s debate “has been opened up”.
He noted that the OECS Assembly was part of the treaty, which calls for it to meet, adding, “If the Assembly is a nuisance, then get rid of it.
“It’s either that it’s something that is meaningful and it has an important objective to lead us toward the political union that we strive for and to enhance or speed up the process of the common economic space that we have created, or it just becomes a talk shop and then the big boys who are prime ministers and the finance ministers get together and they decide it and then they come back to the next assembly, again with another suite of stuff that the rest of us just sit down and don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Friday said that if “any useful thing” was accomplished during Tuesday’s sitting, “I hope that this is what it does now, it makes us think about, ‘What is the OECS Assembly? What is it purpose?’
“Because the treaty provides for it. Whether it functions or not depends on the people who actually implement it. The architecture by itself doesn’t determine how it functions. What matters is the people who inhabit that structure, and we are those people, and so we should make it meaningful,” he told the legislators from the sub-region.