What Happened to Constitutional Reform Report?

The day’s prime minister described Suzie d’Auvergne’s Constitutional Reform Commission as “probably the most extensive and intensive consultation ever undertaken in Saint Lucia, even prior to and after Independence.” It had taken seven years, and countless meetings with Saint Lucians at home and abroad, not to say lectures by some of the region’s leading intellectuals. As for the commission’s chairperson, the prime minister posthumously acknowledged “her commitment and the fervor with which she had embraced the process for which she was engaged.”

Finally the House was ready on 18 August 2015 to debate the report submitted by the commission, with 270 submissions and close to 200 recommendations. Last week readers were reminded of some of the comments from both sides of the House. But before returning to the MP for Castries East, whose insightful words ended the first of this series last week, permit me a small digression. Despite their almost daily insistence that most of this country’s problems stem from a constitution rooted in our colonial past, it had some time ago occurred to me that few Saint Lucians had read the 87-page document.

On reflection, the depressing discovery should not have been the surprise it was, considering how shamelessly we’ve acknowledged our inability to handle more than five lines (of prose, that is) at one sitting. It explains the nonexistence of a regular bookstore or a performing arts theater in this city that eighty-something years ago had given birth to two Nobel laureates, the lack of respect shown them when they were still among us, and why most of what we think we know of them proceeded from the mouths of functional illiterates and verbose talking heads whose sole source of information is Facebook.

No surprise that we’re stuck with a parliament best known as a slaughterhouse for what used to be known as “the Queen’s English.” Which returns us to where we left off last Saturday, with the Castries East MP extolling the virtues of our 87-page constitution as it has been since 22 February 1979. By all he’d said earlier, he saw no great need to adjust the existing Saint Lucia Constitution. We pick him up now as he further emphasizes the point: “The constitution has served us well. It has served us well because this country has had elections, albeit sometimes it was all right in the morning.” 

 The last phrase, albeit it was all right in the morning, was Pierre’s sly reference to a vote count in Vieux Fort the morning after the 1974 general elections, when victory went to UWP’s Henry Giraudy—who had lost to the SLP’s Bruce Williams the evening before. 

“The fact we must understand is that the people are the ones who must tell us how to run the country,” said Pierre, “not a group of people who believe they have better brains but do not want to face the hassle and pressure of running for political office. They want to constitutionalize their position in being able to tell people what to do, probably because of their education, their background or their class or their financial situation. They believe that gives them the right to dictate what happens in this country.”

He had formed his shocking impression after analyzing some of the provisions in the report. “I see it clearly,” he said. “This report recommends that elected parliamentarians should not be ministers. In what is called a hybrid situation, you have a candidate and a running mate. When the candidate becomes a minister he has to give up and his running mate takes over. For some reason the elected person cannot and should not be a minister. Why? Mr. Speaker, that I cannot answer.”

Others before him had also balked at the suggestion that winning a seat for their party should not guarantee them ministerial status and responsibility for certain portfolios. Pierre insisted that the ordinary citizen knew without being told what he wanted for himself and his family and voted for the candidate more likely to deliver it. As he interpreted the recommendations, it seemed to Pierre that the report advocated an abortion of the normal process in favor of handpicking for office individuals “with no link to the people.” He imagined they would have had “no experience of being rebuffed” on the campaign trail. No experience of having to take care of “the needs of hundreds of people.” 

It is difficult to decide whether the MPs who denounced the recommendations for reforming parliament were less concerned about “the people” than their own interests. 

The troublesome recommendations: “There should be the creation of a mixed model of government with a different kind of executive branch to that which currently prevails. Under that new system, the only member of the executive branch who will belong to both the legislative and the executive will be the prime minister. However, a deputy prime minister will serve as a member of Cabinet without ministerial authority except when deputizing for the prime minister. To this end he or she will be appointed on the basis of his ability to command the support of a majority of elected Members of Parliament and he or she will appoint ministers. If a minister is selected from parliament, he or she must subsequently resign as a member of Parliament to take the post of minister.

“The prime minister will remain accountable to Parliament and can be removed by a motion of no confidence there. But his ministers will be vicariously accountable through a summons that will be issued to them by parliamentary committees and the presiding officers of both Houses to appear there as and when their presence is desired or required. 

“The appointment of any minister from the House of Assembly will require a substitute Member of Parliament to replace the Member of Parliament for the constituency that the minister previously represented. In order to effect this, one option is political parties can be required under the new constitutional arrangement to name running mates for all constituencies that are being contested in general or by-elections and independent candidates will be required to name a substitute if they contest an election.”

What may have had the greatest impact on MPs was the following: “With the exception of the prime minister and the deputy prime minister, members of the House of Assembly and the Senate will no longer be members of the Cabinet.” There was also this: “The House of Assembly should scrutinize and ratify nominations by the prime minister for persons to be appointed as ministers.” 

Or this: “Special Parliamentary Committees should be created as joint select committees to oversee government ministries, departments, agencies and commissions.” Or that: “Ministers will be directly accountable to parliamentary committees. These committees will summon ministers to appear to be questioned on matters of executive policy, proposed legislation and administrative functions of their ministries.”

It seems to me that if adopted the above quoted recommendations would likely result in the official transparency and accountability that campaigning politicians have over countless years promised with no intention of delivering. Remarkably, all the MPs who participated in the debates of 18 and 25 August 2015 seemed concerned with, when it came to the above recommendations, was power and influence—for themselves, not for the people!

NEXT WEEK: The Power of Recall!