Dix­ie-Ann?Dick­son

?Dr Ralph Gon­salves Prime Min­is­ter of St Vin­cent and the Grenadines has dis­missed the idea of an ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­dent, say­ing it was not part of his coun­try's cul­ture. Gon­salves said he opt­ed for a par­lia­men­tary democ­ra­cy. He said he be­lieved the pop­u­la­tion must have a voice and must con­tribute to con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form. Gon­salves was out­lin­ing de­tails of a re­vised con­sti­tu­tion for St Vin­cent and Grenadines yes­ter­day while de­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at an In­ter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence host­ed by YesTT, at Hilton Trinidad, Port-of-Spain. The two-day con­fer­ence, which be­gan yes­ter­day, car­ried the theme Strength­en­ing De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Process­es and Good Gov­er­nance.

Asked by Dr Sel­wyn Ryan, Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of UWI, dur­ing the ques­tion and an­swer seg­ment, why he did not choose the di­rec­tion of a pres­i­den­tial mod­el, Gon­salves said, "Po­lit­i­cal cul­tures shape who we are... we have a par­lia­men­tary democ­ra­cy–hav­ing an ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­dent is not part of our tra­di­tion. This would on­ly al­low one per­son to have all the pow­er." How­ev­er, Gon­salves said he could not com­ment on T&T as he did not know the coun­try's po­lit­i­cal cul­ture. He was al­so asked by Regi­nald Du­mas, for­mer am­bas­sador and head of Pub­lic Ser­vice of T&T, why he chose to de­part from the tra­di­tion­al prac­tice of max­i­mum lead­er­ship.

He said, "We are deal­ing with a dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tion and with the phe­nom­e­non of glob­al­i­sa­tion. How­ev­er, if we are to build vi­able struc­tures, the old plan must be al­tered. The old plan is not work­ing." He added that many dis­cus­sions have not dealt with the im­pact of glob­al­i­sa­tion on gov­er­nance, which was a very im­por­tant is­sue. Var­i­ous civ­il so­ci­eties, in­tel­lec­tu­als and Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials such as for­mer pres­i­dents of T&T Sir El­lis Clarke and Arthur NR Robin­son and deputy speak­er Pene­lope Beck­les were in at­ten­dance.

Gon­za­les said deep­en­ing and widen­ing par­lia­men­tary democ­ra­cy was his main pur­pose. This ap­proach, how­ev­er, would in­clude seek­ing a ref­er­en­dum ma­jor­i­ty of two-thirds. "We are to trust the peo­ple. Con­sti­tu­tion is about self-mas­ter­ing, but in sol­i­dar­i­ty with one an­oth­er," Gon­salves said. He not­ed that the pop­u­la­tion would be able to voice their sug­ges­tions through town hall meet­ings af­ter which a draft of the con­sti­tu­tion would be drawn.