Sec­re­tary of Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties & Trans­porta­tion in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA), Tashia Bur­ris must be cred­it­ed with the cop-out of the year as she sought to jus­ti­fy why the THA is part­ner­ing with Grena­da in­stead of Trinidad for next week's Car­ni­val.

Bur­ris told a news con­fer­ence Mon­day that "the re­al­i­ty is be­fore we were joined to Trinidad we were joined to Grena­da."

As ir­rel­e­vant as the ref­er­ence was, Bur­ris is cor­rect from a his­toric stand­point.

Long be­fore the is­land be­came a ward of Trinidad in 1898, To­ba­go was part of the Wind­ward Is­lands and there­fore was clos­er to Grena­da than it was to Trinidad.

But who ex­act­ly is Bur­ris at­tempt­ing to fool in­to think­ing that the THA's Car­ni­val de­ci­sion had any­thing to do with his­to­ry?

What can she tell us of Grena­da's Car­ni­val prod­uct that is more valu­able than the work that goes in­to months of cel­e­bra­tions across Trinidad cul­mi­nat­ing in two days of parad­ing in Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do?

Bur­ris' cop-out is a poor at­tempt to hide the fact that the Pro­gres­sive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Pa­tri­ots which now con­trols the THA, har­bours long­stand­ing mis­con­cep­tions that to part­ner with lo­cal au­thor­i­ties is to part­ner with the Gov­ern­ment.

It seems al­so to be en­cour­ag­ing a kind of di­vi­sive think­ing echoed by many To­bag­o­ni­ans, that Tri­nis are in­strin­si­cal­ly in­va­sive to their way of do­ing things and there­fore should be re­ject­ed when pos­si­ble.

Both ar­gu­ments are ter­ri­bly flawed and when ap­plied to this month's Car­ni­val, vex­a­tious.

To seek the sup­port of lo­cal bod­ies in­volved in Car­ni­val such as the Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so­ni­ans Or­gan­i­sa­tion or the Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion, is not to seek the sup­port of a PNM Gov­ern­ment.

The ex­per­tise that re­sides in these bod­ies tran­scends all ad­min­is­tra­tions and has for years been the en­gine rooms of a Car­ni­val prod­uct of­ten deemed 'The Great­est Show on Earth'.

The PDP-run THA, there­fore, must not en­cour­age the my­opic think­ing that any­thing to do with Trinidad is in­trin­si­cal­ly linked to those that gov­ern the coun­try.

On the oth­er hand, the brunt of Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions is tied to the ex­per­tise of pri­vate com­pa­nies and per­son­nel such as Tribe, Lega­cy, Ceasar's Army and in­di­vid­ual so­ca artistes, all far su­pe­ri­or to any­thing Grena­da of­fers.

In seek­ing to en­sure that the To­ba­go's cre­ative in­dus­try was not dis­ad­van­taged by Trinida­di­an com­pa­nies mass-pro­duc­ing cos­tumes, the THA wise­ly de­ter­mined that all Trinida­di­an pro­duc­ers must part­ner with To­bag­o­ni­ans to be al­lowed to par­tic­i­pate there.

We couldn't agree more with the THA in this stance.

In fact, it should have adopt­ed this ex­act ap­proach with the over­all ad­min­is­tra­tion of the Car­ni­val, that is, lim­it­ing the amount of part­ner­ship it want­ed with Trinidad, rather than seek­ing to dis­miss the big­ger is­land and align­ing the $17.5 mil­lion event with Grena­da en­tire­ly.

The fact that Caribbean Air­lines has opened up 19,000 ad­di­tion­al seats to To­ba­go for the fes­ti­val, speaks to a big­ger de­mand from Trinida­di­ans want­i­ng to trav­el there.

The fetes, limes and oth­er events will have a sig­nif­i­cant­ly high Trinida­di­an pres­ence as seen in oth­er oc­ca­sions like the Great Fete Week­end.

This, we know, will be a ma­jor boost to the econ­o­my, bring­ing rev­enue to ven­dors, hote­liers, taxi dri­vers, car rental com­pa­nies and bars.

We can on­ly hope that Bur­ris recog­nis­es this and that when she sings the prais­es of the Car­ni­val's suc­cess at the next THA ple­nary sit­ting, she would ad­mit how im­por­tant the roles of those from Trinidad were and how lit­tle Grena­da tru­ly con­tributed.