The Chair­man of the To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber says there isn't enough clar­i­ty on what is meant by au­ton­o­my for To­ba­go.

Ac­cord­ing to Mar­tin George, that lack of clar­i­ty is the re­al rea­son the To­ba­go Au­ton­o­my Bill wasn't passed, as there were no re­al specifics out­lin­ing what ‘au­ton­o­my’ would re­al­ly mean and look like for the is­land.

He be­lieves the dis­course sur­round­ing au­ton­o­my has been over sim­pli­fied, and when the re­al­i­ty of au­ton­o­my is much more com­plex.  He says the ef­fects of au­ton­o­my are far reach­ing and will in­volve sig­nif­i­cant changes to the Con­sti­tu­tion.

“Where do we start?  Do we start look­ing at a fed­er­al sys­tem?” he asked.  “How are we go­ing to change the Leg­is­la­ture in the THA? Will To­ba­go be able to make its own laws? How will that im­pact Trinidad?”

“You have to still think in terms of a twin-is­land na­tion,” he points out. “I some­times won­der if the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion in To­ba­go re­al­ly un­der­stands the im­pli­ca­tions and ram­i­fi­ca­tions, and all that is in­volved in some of these ideas when you speak of some­thing like a ‘fed­er­al state’.”

He not­ed: “You can’t have a fed­er­al state by it­self.  It means you have to cre­ate Trinidad as a fed­er­al state too.”

And George is adding his voice to the cho­rus of con­dem­na­tion for a state­ment made by THA Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine, in which he re­ferred to Prime Min­is­ter Doc­tor Kei­th as a "house slave", fol­low­ing the fail­ure of both bills in Par­lia­ment on Mon­day.

George says while Au­gus­tine did not make the state­ment in the Par­lia­ment it­self, it was dis­re­spect­ful both to the Prime Min­is­ter and to the Par­lia­ment.

“There ought to be a cer­tain lev­el of ci­vil­i­ty and gen­til­i­ty which ought to at­tend our pub­lic dis­cours­es and pub­lic dis­cus­sions,” he ob­served, “par­tic­u­lar­ly when you are talk­ing about na­tion­al is­sues.  We had un­for­tu­nate ‘hot mic’ in­ci­dent ear­li­er this year. We’ve seen some ex­am­ples of re­al­ly atro­cious be­hav­iour in the Par­lia­ment with the types of com­ments that are made.”

“It re­al­ly de­grades and de­bas­es what is sup­posed to be our high­est court—be­cause that is what the Par­lia­ment is.  It is the high­est leg­isla­tive body in the land,” George said. 

“So, you ought not to be car­ry­ing on or mak­ing com­ments or speak­ing in such a way,” he as­serts.

Mar­tin George was speak­ing on to­day’s edi­tion of CNC3's The Morn­ing Brew show.