NewsTHE decision to have the minister responsible appoint members of constituency councils will not be supported by the Opposition Barbados Labour Party (BLP) when the Bill is debated in Parliament next week.
Opposition Member of Parliament (MP) for St. Joseph, Dale Marshall, argued yesterday that the members of the council should be elected by constituents to ensure that the bodies are democratic.
“What we have now is the Government seeking to establish a framework which will interpose itself between central government and the constituents in such a way as almost to exclude any meaningful participation by the MP. In fact, the MP will only sit on the council as an ex-officio member.
“We don’t think that this will serve to empower Barbadians, we think that really it serves to consolidate the power, and it worries us that the Bill as it is crafted will serve to consolidate the power of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) in Barbados and help to support their particular MPs. So that is not about strengthening democracy,” he said.
Marshall said, about the decision to appoint the councils, “We feel that that flies in the face of what all parliamentarians represented to the people of this country; that they were going to be representing their interests at all levels. But, perhaps more fundamentally than that, is the fact that the establishment of the constituency councils along the line of the model that has been posited by the DLP in our view, represents a threat to democracy because Barbadians are not going to be given the opportunity to vote for who represents them on the councils.”
Marshall also stated that the minister, in this case Minister of Social Care, Constituency Empowerment and Rural and Urban Development, Christopher Sinckler, would have the sole right to determine who sits on the councils. “We consider that this is a clear misstep and the councils should not proceed in that way.”
He believed, instead, that it was in the best interest of the councils to go forward on the basis of broad public participation. (NC)
Reproduced from the Barbados Advocate of February 6, 2009.
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Calendar of EventsThis DLP government does not have any answers to the serious questions being asked by Barbadians or to the problems this country faces, which require urgent action and resolution. The DLP does not know what it is doing.
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