Max­ie Cuffie

The pop­u­la­tion owes a debt of grat­i­tude to In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Dhanayshar Ma­habir for ef­fec­tive­ly killing the runoff pro­vi­sion in the Con­sti­tu­tion (Amend­ment) Bill 2014. Al­though the bill was passed, as every­one now knows, the re­call pro­vi­sion was al­ways go­ing to be still­born since the bar has been set so high that it will be vir­tu­al­ly im­pos­si­ble for any MP to be re­called. The fixed term lim­its was al­ways a non-is­sue since the elec­torate has al­ready found a way to im­pose its own term lim­its.

But by in­sist­ing on a 25 per cent thresh­old for the runoff pro­vi­sion and in­clud­ing that a third par­ty which gets with­in five per cent of the sec­ond place win­ner should al­so be in­clud­ed in the sec­ond poll, Dr Ma­habir forced the Gov­ern­ment to con­cede the pos­si­bil­i­ty that MPs will be elect­ed with less than 50 per cent of the vote. But this is pre­cise­ly what the bill was draft­ed to pre­vent.

This means, for ex­am­ple, that as was the case in 2007 when the PNM was elect­ed with 21 seats over the 50 per cent thresh­old (and not 20 as I stat­ed two weeks ago), any strong third par­ty chal­lenge can force a three-way fight in a con­stituen­cy. And the even­tu­al win­ner will not need to get 50 per cent.

Such re­sults are pos­si­ble in close­ly fought mar­gin­al seats. In 2007, for ex­am­ple, the PNM won St Joseph with 46.75 per cent of the vote while the UNC got 28.94 and the COP got 24.31 (a dif­fer­ence of 4.63 be­tween sec­ond and third). In that same year in Ch­agua­nas East the COP got 25.8 per cent while the UNC vote amount­ed to 31.5 per cent (a dif­fer­ence of 5.7 per cent) with the PNM win­ning with 42.67 per cent. A strong third par­ty will there­fore as­sure a win for the PNM with on­ly slight im­prove­ment on the COP's 2007 per­for­mance.

The prob­lem is, it is clear that the bill was orig­i­nal­ly draft­ed to pre­vent just such an even­tu­al­i­ty, since the UNC/PP has the greater ten­den­cy for split­ting its vote, as hap­pened in the re­cent St Joseph by-elec­tion and has been the case for much of its his­to­ry.

On Thurs­day night, as Dr Ma­habir re­hashed his ex­pla­na­tion (in the man­ner of a weary pro­fes­sor) of just how the for­mu­la would work, it was clear that not on­ly did many of the sen­a­tors not un­der­stand, but more wor­ry­ing­ly, no one on the Gov­ern­ment bench­es seemed aware of how it would work to en­sure the elec­tion of ma­jor­i­ty MPs.

It was ap­proach­ing 11 pm, how­ev­er, and the tired sen­a­tors were clear­ly un­able to an­swer the ques­tion re­peat­ed­ly asked by Faris al Rawi on whether the for­mu­la would sat­is­fy the orig­i­nal aims of the leg­is­la­tion. They just did not know.

But we should not be sur­prised since, it was al­ways clear, few on the Gov­ern­ment bench­es ac­tu­al­ly un­der­stood the phi­los­o­phy be­hind the bill and just how the mea­sures would achieve it. And they were not alone. The MFO poll com­mis­sioned by the Sun­day Ex­press and pub­lished just two days be­fore the Sen­ate de­bate showed wide­spread ig­no­rance of the claus­es of the bill–al­though it had been al­ready passed in the Low­er House.

Ac­cord­ing to that poll, 85 per cent of those polled want­ed the de­bate stopped for more con­sul­ta­tion on the mat­ter.

Ahead of the pub­li­ca­tion by the Sun­day Ex­press, the Gov­ern­ment found it nec­es­sary to re­lease its own MORI poll find­ings, which on the face of it, gave a counter nar­ra­tive to the find­ings in the Ex­press, al­though the two polls were tak­en at a dif­fer­ent time.

The ap­par­ent dif­fer­ence in the poll find­ings, for ex­am­ple, al­lowed In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Rolph Bal­go­b­in–a for­mer head of the UWI In­sti­tute of Busi­ness, and a man who, just by virtue of his qual­i­fi­ca­tions, must have been trained in sur­vey meth­ods–to state on the Sen­ate floor his dis­trust of polling.

Trinidad and To­ba­go, Bal­go­b­in said, was a dif­fi­cult coun­try to poll, adding, even more amaz­ing­ly, be­cause some­one from Debe could have a dif­fer­ent opin­ion from some­one from Pe­nal. One would like to be­lieve that Dr Bal­go­b­in knows bet­ter than that and that both polls were an ac­cu­rate re­flec­tion of what they sought to sur­vey at the time they were con­duct­ed.

More wor­ry­ing, how­ev­er, is that de­spite an elab­o­rate me­dia cam­paign by the Gov­ern­ment, the polls found a de­cid­ed lack of in­ter­est in the Con­sti­tu­tion re­form pro­pos­als which have tak­en up so much par­lia­men­tary re­sources.

The MORI poll, ac­cord­ing to the News­day, found:

"Though the ma­jor­i­ty backed in­di­vid­ual re­forms, when ques­tioned ini­tial­ly on sup­port for 'the Gov­ern­ment's pro­pos­als to re­form the Con­sti­tu­tion' the out­come was dif­fer­ent. A to­tal of 35 per cent said they sup­port­ed, while 29 per cent said they op­posed. Mori stat­ed 11 per cent in­di­cat­ed they nei­ther sup­port­ed nor op­posed, while a large chunk, 26 per cent, replied 'don't know' to the ques­tion."

In fact "a to­tal of 17 per cent in­di­cat­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form was one of the most im­por­tant is­sues fac­ing the coun­try..."

It was clear from both polls that there was no pub­lic de­mand for the bills or even an un­der­stand­ing of why they were nec­es­sary. What we were not aware be­fore its pas­sage, how­ev­er, was that the state of ig­no­rance al­so ex­tend­ed to the ma­jor­i­ty of par­lia­men­tar­i­ans who sup­port­ed it.