Sascha Wil­son

Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning says the Gov­ern­ment will em­bark on a se­ries of 51 con­sul­ta­tions on the draft work­ing doc­u­ment on through­out the coun­try. Though he did not give a date for the start of this se­ries, the PM an­nounced that it would be un­der­tak­en by a team head­ed by Prof Hamid Ghany, Dean of the Fac­ul­ty of So­cial Sci­ences at Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine. Thir­ty-nine con­sul­ta­tions will be held in Trinidad, two in To­ba­go and ten oth­er con­sul­ta­tions will be held with spe­cial in­ter­est groups in the coun­try.

Man­ning made the an­nounce­ment at Ma­yaro Recre­ation Ground yes­ter­day, dur­ing the eighth and fi­nal ed­u­ca­tion­al fo­rum held by his par­ty in Trinidad. The PM said up­on com­ple­tion of the con­sul­ta­tion, there would be a fur­ther con­sul­ta­tion with the Gov­ern­ment and out of that a Green Pa­per would be for­mu­lat­ed to go be­fore Par­lia­ment for de­bate. This would fol­lowed by an­oth­er round of con­sul­ta­tion with stake­hold­ers, Man­ning an­nounced, "in a Queen's Hall-type of arrange­ment" be­fore a new con­sti­tu­tion was draft­ed.

Back to draw­ing board

Mean­while, Man­ning said no de­ci­sion had been made on the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion, and that they were go­ing back to the draw­ing board to deal with the mat­ter. Speak­ing about the work­ing draft doc­u­ment of the con­sti­tu­tion, Man­ning said chap­ter ten dealt with the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion. "The In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion, as it ex­ists, just is not work­ing...We are not ready yet to be able to ar­tic­u­late a po­si­tion, but we have to go back to the draw­ing board on that." The PM al­so spoke about abuse of par­lia­men­tary priv­i­lege, and point­ed out that it had be­come "ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult" to deal with it.

"Be­cause, if you look to cur­tail at all free­dom of speech in Par­lia­ment, in fact what you are do­ing is en­croach­ing on the in­de­pen­dence of the leg­is­la­ture, and you are en­croach­ing on the abil­i­ty of Par­lia­ment to prop­er­ly dis­charge its in­de­pen­dent func­tion." Man­ning al­so said they want­ed To­ba­go to have max­i­mum au­ton­o­my with­in the con­text of the uni­tary state of T&T. Work was be­ing done in col­lab­o­ra­tion with To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, he said.