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Killing us softly
December 26, 2000
By Denis Solomon
ALTHOUGH in the long run the choice between a UNC and a PNM government is Hobson’s choice, one regrettable aspect of the UNC’s victory in the 2000 election is that we shall never know whether the PNM would have made good on its promises, explicit and implicit, to review some of the measures adopted by the UNC government over the last five years.
The more explicit of these undertakings relate to contracts to which the UNC government committed the country, the latest being the LNG deal with a consortium of energy companies led by British Petroleum. These would have been difficult to review without heavy penalties. But much of the criticism levelled by the PNM Opposition at the Government’s measures concerned not so much their content as their fundamental morality. This, to my mind, implied an undertaking to reverse, and in the case of laws, to repeal them.
It is a basic tenet of Parliamentary democracy that a newly-elected government does not immediately set about reversing legislation passed under its predecessor. The reason for this is that in the final analysis legislation is passed by Parliament, with input from all quarters, and may therefore be considered fairly representative of the popular will. Governments would find themselves repealing laws in the drafting of which they had collaborated in varying degrees.
We all know, however, that such is not the case here. Legislatively, what the government wants, the government gets. Even in those cases where, according to our Constitution, bipartisanship is imposed by the special majority requirement, the government can sometimes get around the requirement by simply declaring that the proposal concerned is not subject to it. (this determination is supposedly made by the legal draughtsmen, but the legal draughtsmen are in the Attorney General’s office). It is then up to the courts to determine whether the law is unconstitutional or not, and this can only happen if someone injured by it brings an action.
This is the reason for anomalies such as the Dangerous Dogs Bill being deemed to require a special majority (it supposedly involved a limitation of the right to property) while Clause 7 of the Equal Opportunity Bill was passed by a simple majority, despite its draconian limitation of freedom of expression.
The lack of distinction between Government and Parliament, and the consequent incapacity of Opposition or back benches (which in fact do not exist) to affect the content of legislation means, too, that debate becomes a blunt instrument, directed at the gross advantages or failings of Bills, and the supposed intentions, good or bad, behind them, rather than at their details. In the worst cases the debate is no more than an occasion for mutual abuse. The PNM, like all previous Oppositions, therefore had a strong tendency to attribute legislative proposals to anti-democratic and other nefarious instincts of the Government, most of all to its desire to limit civil liberties.
Despite this, several of the UNC’s Bills, attempts at Bills, and executive acts were in fact nefarious and anti-democratic, and were indeed attacks on civil liberties. So the PNM’s criticisms, even if not honest, were justified.
But what distinguished the UNC from the PNM in this regard was not a difference in the purity of its intentions, but simply a difference of degree in the blatancy with which they were acted upon. As a result, the chances are that had the PNM won the recent election, it would not have hesitated to profit from every step in the direction of dictatorship taken by the government in the last five years.
The answer to the hypothetical question I posed at the beginning of this article therefore seems obvious. Basdeo Panday may be particularly paranoid about the media, but who believes that the repeal of Section 7 of the Equal Opportunity Bill would have been a priority for a PNM government once Section 7 became a weapon in its hands? Who believes that Mr. Manning would have braved the anger of the evangelistic sects by taking away their right to abuse each other from their pulpits and restoring my right to abuse them in my columns?
Who believes that Mr. Manning would have modified the charter of NBN to make it less of a tool in the hands of a PNM, or any future, government? He might have hastened to sign the Chapultepec Declaration. He might have moved to restore Trinidad and Tobago’s membership of the UN and Inter-American human rights conventions. These would have been good propaganda without demonstrable reduction in executive power. But he certainly would not have been in any hurry to give Parliament the right to ratify accession to or withdrawal from treaties in the future. That would have been a limitation on the Government’s domination of Parliament. That domination is so dear to Mr. Manning that in his election campaign he proclaimed his intention of giving teeth to the Crossing the Floor Act “within seconds” of being returned to office.
The pity about legislation that turns out to be repressive in the context of our Parliament is that in a proper Parliamentary environment (i.e. one where the dictatorial instincts of governments are held in check) it need not be repressive at all. As I have pointed out before, the Devil can quote scripture. When Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj’s attempt to bring the Civil Service and the Judiciary under closer government control was opposed by the Chief Justice and five former CJ’s and Presidents, Maharaj said that the public should have the right to scrutinise, through Parliament, the operations of any sector of the State, including the Civil Service and the Judiciary. In this he was perfectly right. As a result, the only argument the Six Wise Men could muster against him was one that was also perfectly true, but which they were reluctant to use, as men who themselves had always had a stake in the status quo: the argument that Parliament, as opposed to the Government, did not exist.
The goal to which Parliament (i.e. Government and Opposition) should have bent its efforts, with input from the Six Wise Men and the rest of society, was to devise a system that would have made Parliamentary scrutiny of the Civil Service and the Judiciary possible without interference from the government or the Opposition as such. The charter of NBN and the necessary protocols for incorporating it, with all other media organs, into an environment of freedom of expression and media responsibility, was the work of an enlightened Parliament, not the Director of Communications acting at the behest of a Minister of Communications or a Prime Minister. But as it was, subjects such as these, vital to the strengthening of democracy, are corrupted in their gestation by superficial political animosities, and at birth become instantaneous instruments of political repression.
So even if the court’s decision in the Gypsy and Chaitan cases puts Mr. Manning back in the driver’s seat, all we can expect is a reduction in stridency. Like the new Russian national anthem, the words will be different, but the tune will be the same.
Copyright © Denis Solomon
