St Lucia Opposition leader thinks OECS should have new arrangement with CARICOM
St Lucia Opposition leader Allen Chastanet says the OECS assembly has become ceremonial and suggests OECS makes a new arrangement with CARICOM.
Chastanet says he would like to think, with what is taking place in the world today, that the OECS leaders would have understood a need for change.
“Sometimes you have to take a very radical position to start appreciating whether, in fact, it is a greater opportunity to be had. So here it is that we’re discussing bills about the integration of trade to make it easier and functioning. Yet we are members of CARICOM, in which that is not working. And all the leaders sitting around this table all know that our relationship with CARICOM is not working.”
“Imagine if we had the tenacity to pull out of Caricom and renegotiate bilateral agreements with Jamaica, bilaterals with Trinidad, bilaterals with Guyana, and bilaterals with Barbados. Would we be better off? Not saying we do it, but sometimes we have to ask ourselves that question, because certainly when I was Prime Minister, I felt that we were being ignored.”
“I felt we were being disrespected. I felt so many times we went to a meeting at CARICOM and listened to the larger countries debate among themselves, as if we were not even there and reached no conclusion. We’ve all left our homes with the great expectation of coming together to resolve something.”
“Are we all going to sit here and try to suggest that we are going to have a common policy on the value of tariffs? Really, we all are at different stages of development. And worse yet, we were talking about common internal tariffs. Common VAT rate. Are we ready for that?”
Speaking to CBI, the programme Chastanet said, “How is it that we don’t understand and appreciate maybe exactly what was being said by my colleague from Saint Kitts, that by coming together, we’re going to be more united? We signed an MOA, but the MOA is not sufficient. Why can’t we have one CIP unit? Why can’t the money go to the OECS? Why can’t we use some of the CIP monies that we’re collecting to strengthen the integration of the OECS?”
“If we’re going to have a common border, it means that we must be able to protect that border. How many of our countries have reached that position? How many of us have established and strengthened our border control to that extent? However, I support the idea of integrating a singular border control system”.
“This bill offers us a great opportunity, I believe. It offers us an opportunity to write our own history. Are we prepared to allow this form to become more integrated? I’m not saying to cause legislation to be passed out here that’s going to be enforced, but certainly for dialogue and exactly what the minister from Dominica was talking about with amendments. I think that we have to; we owe it to ourselves. We owe it to the citizens of this country. To get past this being ceremonial”.
