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Friday, July 4, 2025

Opposition queries minister’s expanded powers in Children’s Life Fund

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20 days ago
20250614
Minister of Health Dr Lackram Bodoe during yesterday’s debate on the Children’s Life Fund (Amendment) Bill.

Minister of Health Dr Lackram Bodoe during yesterday’s debate on the Children’s Life Fund (Amendment) Bill.

ROGER JACOB

Se­nior Re­porter/ Pro­duc­er

akash.sama­roo@cnc3.co.tt

As the Gov­ern­ment is propos­ing sweep­ing changes to the laws gov­ern­ing the Chil­dren’s Life Fund, the Op­po­si­tion is rais­ing alarm over how much pow­er it puts in the hands of the Min­is­ter of Health.

An Act to Amend the Chil­dren’s Life Fund be­came the first bill to be laid in Par­lia­ment by the new Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) ad­min­is­tra­tion yes­ter­day.

Health Min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe ini­tial­ly pro­posed two ma­jor amend­ments to the ex­ist­ing law.

Clause 3 of the Bill would amend sec­tion 4(2) (b) of the Act by delet­ing the words “life threat­en­ing ill­ness­es” and sub­sti­tut­ing the words “life lim­it­ing ill­ness­es.”

Pre­vi­ous­ly, a con­di­tion had to be deemed life threat­en­ing to qual­i­fy for con­sid­er­a­tion by the Chil­dren’s Life Fund Au­thor­i­ty (CLFA).

And Clause 6 of the bill would al­low the Min­is­ter of Health to re­view an ap­pli­ca­tion for a grant that has been re­ject­ed by the Board and there­fore give the of­fice hold­er the au­thor­i­ty to over­ride a re­jec­tion.

In ex­plain­ing the ra­tio­nale for the first amend­ment, Min­is­ter Bo­doe said, “this will al­low many of those cas­es de­nied in the past to now be fa­cil­i­tat­ed and con­sid­ered by the CLFA.”

Min­is­ter Bo­doe said that in­for­ma­tion com­ing from the CLFA re­vealed that 472 ap­pli­ca­tions for as­sis­tance were re­ceived be­tween 2010 and 2025. He said 392 of those ap­pli­ca­tions were ap­proved. The min­is­ter said a com­mon rea­son for the CLFA de­clin­ing ap­pli­ca­tions was that the child’s con­di­tion was not life threat­en­ing.

The life-lim­it­ing ill­ness­es list­ed in the leg­is­la­tion un­der Sched­ule 3 are acute lym­phoblas­tic leukaemia, acute myeloid leukaemia, chron­ic myeloid leukaemia, ma­ture B cell lym­phoma, Hodgkin’s lym­phoma, neu­rob­las­toma, os­teosar­co­ma, medul­loblas­toma, retinoblas­toma, soft tis­sue sar­co­ma, Wilms tu­mour, hy­poplas­tic left, all sin­gle ven­tri­cle dis­eases, com­plex heart dis­ease, tetral­o­gy of Fal­lot, com­plex anorec­tal and gen­i­touri­nary anom­alies, pan­cre­at­ic tu­mours, he­pat­ic tu­mours, liv­er trans­plant, kid­ney trans­plant pa­tients, se­vere aplas­tic anaemia, be­ta tha­lassemia, sick­le cell dis­ease, in­her­it­ed bone mar­row fail­ure syn­dromes, and con­gen­i­tal hy­per­in­su­line­mia pheochro­mo­cy­toma”.

The Gov­ern­ment lat­er in­di­cat­ed that a fur­ther amend­ment would come not to lim­it ap­pli­ca­tions to the ill­ness­es list­ed above. This came af­ter Op­po­si­tion MP Stu­art Young cau­tioned that in seek­ing to stick to the list it may ex­clude oth­er dis­eases.

Mean­while in ex­plain­ing the amend­ment for min­is­te­r­i­al over­sight, the Health Min­is­ter ex­plained, “it gives the min­is­ter the pow­er to re­view the re­ject­ed ap­pli­ca­tions, not nec­es­sar­i­ly to change the out­come or the de­ci­sion, but to en­sure some over­sight when cit­i­zens feel ag­griev­ed. It al­so al­lows the min­is­ter and the min­istry to mon­i­tor the de­clined cas­es so as to ex­pand the sched­ule as more and more dis­eases be­come treat­able.”

But Port-of-Spain North/St Ann’s West MP Stu­art Young took se­ri­ous is­sue with that amend­ment. He de­scribed this au­thor­i­ty as giv­ing the Health Min­is­ter a “su­per­pow­er” and the broad­est pos­si­ble pow­ers he said he has ever seen.

“I wouldn’t use the word hyp­o­crit­i­cal, but it is iron­ic that for the past ten years once any piece of leg­is­la­tion came to this House that men­tions giv­ing a min­is­ter a pow­er to sneeze, there was ob­jec­tion by those on the oth­er side. And this is where I cau­tion the pop­u­la­tion, the first piece of leg­is­la­tion that we come to this House to de­bate in this new sit­ting, is leg­is­la­tion that is giv­ing a min­is­ter a pow­er with ab­solute­ly no re­view on it, su­per­pow­ers I call it,” Young posit­ed.

He al­so strong­ly ad­vised the Gov­ern­ment to not cre­ate leg­is­la­tion with an in­di­vid­ual in mind. Young said while Min­is­ter Bo­doe as a qual­i­fied doc­tor may be able to ad­ju­di­cate on some de­ci­sions, if the of­fice hold­er in the fu­ture did not have med­ical ex­pe­ri­ence, then they would not have the ex­per­tise to make such a de­ci­sion.

Dur­ing Young’s con­tri­bu­tion, fur­ther amend­ments were cir­cu­lat­ed. How­ev­er, the Op­po­si­tion MP said he could not re­view them while he was mak­ing his con­tri­bu­tion and asked the Gov­ern­ment to have more cour­tesy in the fu­ture.

Two of those amend­ments men­tioned ear­li­er by Min­is­ter Bo­doe in­volve rais­ing the ceil­ing for fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance through the fund from be­yond its cur­rent $1 mil­lion cap due to what he said was in­creas­ing med­ical costs over the years. And the Health Min­is­ter said there could be pro­vi­sions for for­eign spe­cial­ists to vis­it this coun­try to pro­vide ex­per­tise us­ing lo­cal health fa­cil­i­ties so as to pos­si­bly negate the need for over­seas trav­el in some cas­es.

Con­tribut­ing lat­er, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the spir­it of the law was that the fund should have been dis­trib­uted gen­er­ous­ly, but said its ad­min­is­tra­tors in­stead act­ed with­in the let­ter of the law. She called out the for­mer gov­ern­ment for its cal­lous treat­ment of chil­dren in the last nine years and ques­tioned why dur­ing that time the PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion did not see it nec­es­sary to make ad­just­ments to the CLF even af­ter a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee re­port on the fund in 2023 rec­om­mend­ed that changes be made.

“To­day, I want to ded­i­cate these amend­ments to all the chil­dren, all the par­ents who un­for­tu­nate­ly lost their chil­dren’s lives wait­ing on the fund. And we must make a promise to­day to do all that we can to nev­er again al­low this to hap­pen,” the Prime Min­is­ter con­clud­ed.

The bill was passed late last night with amend­ments.

About the Chil­dren’s Life Fund

The Chil­dren’s Life Fund was es­tab­lished by the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go in No­vem­ber 2010, through an Act of Par­lia­ment: Act No. 12 of 2010, the Chil­dren’s Life Fund Act.

This ini­tia­tive was spear­head­ed by then-Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, with her first Cab­i­net note af­ter as­sum­ing of­fice fo­cus­ing on its es­tab­lish­ment.

A unique as­pect of its ini­tial fund­ing was that ten per cent of the Prime Min­is­ter’s salary and 5 per cent of min­is­ters’ salaries were re­port­ed­ly con­tributed to the fund. There has been no in­di­ca­tion if the do­na­tions would con­tin­ue dur­ing the UNC’s new term in of­fice.

At that time, to qual­i­fy the child had to be a cit­i­zen of T&T, un­mar­ried and un­der the age of 18, re­ferred by a med­ical spe­cial­ist, the re­quired med­ical treat­ment must be un­avail­able lo­cal­ly and it had to be a life-threat­en­ing ill­ness.


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