DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Min­is­ter Stu­art Young is urg­ing the pop­u­la­tion to be re­spon­si­ble and not cre­ate un­rest in the coun­try, but rather take their des­tiny in­to their own hands.

Young made the com­ment while speak­ing in the Up­per House yes­ter­day, in re­sponse to Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark, who warned that the pop­u­la­tion would ri­ot if an al­leged doc­u­ment on tax in­creas­es pur­port­ed­ly from the Min­istry of Fi­nance were proven to be true. Dur­ing the sec­ond read­ing of the Fi­nance (Sup­ple­men­tary Ap­pro­pri­a­tion) (Fi­nan­cial Year 2024) Bill, 2024, Mark al­leged that the Gov­ern­ment planned to in­crease Val­ue-added tax, cor­po­ra­tion tax, and bank­ing rates.

He fur­ther claimed that “a Cab­i­net note” in the pos­ses­sion of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) pur­port­ed to re­move sub­si­dies on so­cial pro­grammes, grants, and al­lowances.

“The Gov­ern­ment must come clean and tell Trinidad and To­ba­go they are eco­nom­i­cal­ly bank­rupt, they have col­lapsed the econ­o­my, they are broke, and there­fore they have brought mea­sures through the Cab­i­net to raise close to $4 bil­lion,” Mark said.

“You’re go­ing to have a so­cial ri­ot in this coun­try if you con­tin­ue to pres­sure the poor peo­ple in this coun­try. You can­not con­tin­ue putting tax af­ter tax af­ter tax on peo­ple,” he added.

How­ev­er, Young said, “The last speak­er, the ho­n­ourable in­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor (Shar­da) Patasar, in­di­cat­ed to the coun­try in her con­tri­bu­tion that there is a need for hope. She re­mind­ed us that what we need, as op­posed to the pre­vi­ous speak­er’s cries for so­cial un­rest, is we need to be a re­spon­si­ble peo­ple.”

He said while the Op­po­si­tion paints a pic­ture of doom and gloom as if the sky were falling, the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) has con­firmed the coun­try’s cur­rent eco­nom­ic out­look.

The min­is­ter re­called that the IMF re­port, dat­ed June 5, said that for the first time in a decade, T&T is un­der­go­ing a grad­ual and sus­tained eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery. He not­ed that the re­port said the forex re­serve is ad­e­quate at 8.3 months of to­tal prospec­tive im­ports. The Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF) al­so stands at US$5.39 bil­lion, hav­ing re­bound­ed to in­crease in val­ue by 10.6 per cent last year.

He said Mark’s state­ments to the con­trary are “com­plete­ly false, mis­in­for­ma­tion and mis­lead­ing.”

“I as­sure the coun­try, whilst it may not be as good as we would like it to be, be­cause I’m sure we would like to have 12 months’ cov­er­age, 24 months cov­er­age, but there are very few coun­tries in the world that don’t print that type of cur­ren­cy and have this lev­el of for­eign ex­change re­serves,” Young stat­ed. The En­er­gy Min­is­ter al­so re­spond­ed to Mark’s as­ser­tion that there are plans to cut the Chron­ic Dis­ease As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (CDAP). Mark had al­so claimed to have a list of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals al­leged­ly be­ing im­port­ed by NIPDEC from Hun­gary and Spain.

The Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor ques­tioned if the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) was grant­i­ng spe­cial im­port per­mits to pro­cure phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­ucts from these coun­tries. How­ev­er, Young con­demned the com­ments. “Per­son­al­is­ing an at­tack on the CMO, which I de­nounce here to­day be­cause it is not the CMO who de­cides the im­por­ta­tion and use of drugs.

It is not the in­di­vid­ual; there is a body of ex­perts, in­clud­ing phar­ma­cists, in­clud­ing pub­lic health doc­tors that de­cide whether drugs should be im­port­ed for pub­lic use etcetera,” he said.

As for fu­el sub­si­dies, Young hit back at Mark, who said the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery would have been a net for­eign ex­change earn­er. Young said the Gov­ern­ment had to bud­get care­ful­ly, con­sid­er­ing fluc­tu­at­ing glob­al en­er­gy prices. He sought to re­mind the pop­u­la­tion that $3 bil­lion was spent on fu­el sub­si­dies back in 2008, $2 bil­lion in 2012, $4.9 bil­lion in 2013, $7.2 bil­lion in 2014, and $5 bil­lion in 2015. The Min­is­ter said oil pro­duc­tion was high­er back then, and the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery was in op­er­a­tion, which meant it bled forex.