An unusual division took place on the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property (No 2) Bill 2014 last week in the Senate, when four of the six opposition senators who voted in favour of the exact bill on June 11 this year, decided to abstain on the very same bill last Tuesday.
Back in June, the Senate divided on the basis of 28 in favour and none against. At that time, the opposition senators who voted for the bill were Camille Robinson-Regis, Faris Al-Rawi, Dianne Baldeo-Chadeesingh, Shamfa Cudjoe and temporary senator, Stuart Young.
Last Tuesday, the Senate divided 24 in favour and six abstentions with Messrs Robinson-Regis, Al-Rawi, Baldeo-Chadeesingh and Cudjoe changing their position on the bill from affirmative to abstention. Stuart Young, who had voted in favour in June, was not on the opposition benches as all of the substantive senators were present.
This bill has had a tortuous history during the lifetime of the current Parliament and is regarded by the Government as one of their flagship achievements based on their manifesto promises from the 2010 general election campaign.
The bill lapsed at the end of the Fourth Session of this Parliament and was brought to the House of Representatives at the beginning of the current Fifth Session that commenced on August 4. The Minister of Planning and Sustainable Development, Dr Bhoe Tewarie, accepted the fact that some opposition members in the House of Representatives wanted to propose amendments to the bill subsequent to its approval by their colleagues in the Upper House.
As it turned out, the Government did not accept any amendments to the bill that was originally passed by the Senate with support from the government, independent and opposition benches. The proposal of further amendments in the House by the Opposition at variance with what was agreed by their senatorial caucus raised some issues of debate about consistency.
At the same time, the Opposition took the view that there were new issues that they wished to ventilate and to have considered which was the basis for their change of heart in the Lower House.The decision by the Government to allow the bill to lapse at the end of the Fourth Session caused some anxiety among stakeholder groups who had been lobbying for some time for this bill to come to fruition.
In the circumstances, there were two streams of concern flowing through the future passage of this legislation. One was the introduction of new concerns by opposition MPs in the Lower House at variance with their senatorial colleagues in the Upper House. The other was the decision by the Government to allow the bill to lapse in the face of a change of heart by the Opposition between its passage in the Senate and its arrival on the Order Paper of the House of Representatives.
As it turned out, the Government took a position not to change the original bill that was passed by the Senate on June 11 instant. The Opposition had a decision to make and their caucus decided to shift their position from voting in favour (as they did in the Senate in June) to abstention in the House of Representatives in December.
Because the bill had lapsed at the end of the last session at the end of July and had started its second life on the parliamentary agenda in August in the House of Representatives, it had to go back to the Senate for approval. That process was relatively swift. However, the Opposition advanced a different position on this occasion from what had been advanced in June.
This was necessary for their caucus to establish the reasons why some of them would be changing their original vote in June from voting in favour of the identical bill, to abstaining on it.
In summary, in June 2014 all 28 senators present in the Senate voted in favour of the bill. In December 2014, 26 government MPs voted for the bill and there were ten abstentions from the opposition benches in the House of Representatives. The saga of the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property (No 2) Bill 2014 came to an end last Tuesday with 24 senators (government and independent) voting in favour of the bill and six opposition senators abstaining on the bill.
There were three temporary senators who voted in favour of the first bill in the Senate on June 11, and they were Larry Lalla who replaced Senator Raziah Ahmed, Dr Aysha B Edwards who replaced Senator Hugh Russell Ian Roach, and Stuart Young who replaced Senator Avinash Singh.
Of the three, Stuart Young has now been selected as a candidate for the PNM for the Port-of-Spain North/St Ann's West constituency. It is quite likely that he may be asked to state his position on the bill now that he will be offering himself for elected office. Would he have abstained on instructions from the PNM caucus or does he maintain his original position that he would have supported the bill seeing that there was no change from June to December?