Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les says the Gov­ern­ment has a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to di­rect­ly re­spond to claims that this coun­try is in a re­ces­sion, not­ing that she was not pleased with the lack of clear mes­sag­ing on the is­sue.

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, dur­ing her con­tri­bu­tion to the Bud­get de­bate in the Low­er House on Oc­to­ber 19, re­ject­ed claims that this coun­try was in a re­ces­sion, say­ing T&T was "in pro­gres­sion, not a re­ces­sion."

How­ev­er, re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia’s ques­tions dur­ing a protest over wa­ter short­ages in Mal­abar on Sat­ur­day, Beck­les said clear­er, more de­tailed re­spons­es were need­ed to these con­cerns.

"The Gov­ern­ment has been very silent on that, as a mat­ter of fact the min­is­ter when he was do­ing his wind­ing up, sim­ply said, 'Promise made, promise de­liv­ered,' no com­ment at all, but I have said where sev­er­al econ­o­mists have said 'yes the coun­try in a re­ces­sion' and one would have ex­pect­ed the Gov­ern­ment to com­ment and not just the Prime Min­is­ter to not just say that we don't have a re­ces­sion; we have a pro­gres­sion.

"It's on­ly 13 of us (in Op­po­si­tion), but we have done ex­cep­tion­al­ly well to en­sure that we bring be­fore the pub­lic a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of is­sues."

She added that the Op­po­si­tion has con­tin­ued to do its part to bet­ter un­der­stand bud­getary al­lo­ca­tions, re­fer­ring to Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo's ac­knowl­edg­ing that an er­ror was made in the al­lo­ca­tion for the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (TRHA).

"I raised it when I spoke orig­i­nal­ly; the Gov­ern­ment stayed very silent about it and yes­ter­day (Fri­day) we were able to get the Min­is­ter (of Fi­nance) to in­di­cate that it was an er­ror that was made.

"As it re­lates to To­ba­go, we were able to in­di­cate that there have been sev­er­al de­creas­es vir­tu­al­ly every­where."

In a me­dia re­lease on Fri­day, the Di­vi­sion of Health and Well­ness of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) not­ed that it be­gan the nec­es­sary pa­per­work to re­quest the ad­di­tion­al fund­ing re­quired to re­store the al­lo­ca­tion to ap­prox­i­mate­ly $750 mil­lion con­sis­tent with the TRHA's cus­tom­ary an­nu­al al­lo­ca­tion.

"The Di­vi­sion of Health and Well­ness ac­knowl­edges the pub­licly stat­ed er­ror by the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and ex­pects the gov­ern­ment to cor­rect the al­lo­ca­tion and pro­vide the re­sources nec­es­sary to main­tain a ful­ly func­tion­al health­care sys­tem in To­ba­go."