The high­way from San Fer­nan­do to Point Fortin is im­por­tant to the fu­ture de­vel­op­ment of this coun­try be­cause it po­ten­tial­ly opens up the area from which most of T&T's wealth de­rives, af­fects a large sec­tor of the pop­u­la­tion and, at a to­tal es­ti­mat­ed cost of $7.2 bil­lion, is a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the coun­try's cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture bud­get for the next three years.

The project has at­tract­ed a great deal of con­tro­ver­sy be­cause of the op­po­si­tion to it from the High­way Re-Route Move­ment and its leader, Wayne Kublals­ingh, who staged a three-week long hunger strike last year out­side of the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter to un­der­score his protest.

The cen­tral pil­lar of Kublals­ingh's ac­tion was that work on the Debe to Mon De­sir sec­tion of the high­way should have been stopped, while the high­way re­ports, re­search and stud­ies were re­viewed by an in­de­pen­dent body.

As a re­sult of the time­ly in­ter­ven­tion of the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Com­mit­tee for the con­struc­tion in­dus­try (JCC), a high­way re­view com­mit­tee was es­tab­lished–head­ed by In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor James Arm­strong–to con­duct the kind of re­view Mr Kublals­ingh was call­ing for. The ap­point­ment of the com­mit­tee was enough to con­vince the ac­tivist to call off his hunger strike.

The JCC, which is per­ceived as be­ing a non-par­ti­san in­ter­est group, ought to have de­liv­ered the of­fi­cial find­ings to the pub­lic first, giv­en the im­por­tance of the project and its own role in the re­view of it. In­stead, with the full sup­port of his Cab­i­net col­leagues, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Em­manuel George on Thurs­day de­cid­ed to bring the "good news to the pop­u­la­tion" that the re­port of the com­mit­tee on the con­tro­ver­sial project "in­di­cates that the high­way should be built."

At the post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence, Mr George re­vealed he had re­ceived an un­signed copy of the re­port on Ash Wednes­day.

Giv­en the amount of pub­lic at­ten­tion that was giv­en to Mr Kublals­ingh's hunger strike, it is as­ton­ish­ing that the min­is­ter chose to cher­ryp­ick from the ex­ec­u­tive sum­ma­ry of the re­port rather than make the en­tire re­port pub­lic.

It would not have sur­prised any­one that his in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the re­port was im­me­di­ate­ly chal­lenged by Dr Kublals­ingh and, thus, once again the coun­try ap­pears to be poised on the cusp of a new round of con­fu­sion over the Debe to Mon De­sir leg of the high­way.

These vary­ing in­ter­pre­ta­tions would seem to re­quire that the JCC step for­ward to let the pub­lic know its find­ings and how things should move for­ward now. This is crit­i­cal since leaked el­e­ments of the probe sug­gest the JCC has al­so asked that the project be stopped un­til all the is­sues not prop­er­ly dealt with in the first in­stance are sat­is­fied, which is what Kublals­ingh's group asked for in the first place.

The ba­sis of Dr Kublals­ingh's hunger strike–and the gen­er­al un­ease about the Gov­ern­ment's han­dling of the con­struc­tion ef­fort–was as a re­sult of the lack of trans­paren­cy with which the Gov­ern­ment dealt with op­po­si­tion to the project.

There was an ex­pec­ta­tion that in com­pil­ing the re­port, the re­view com­mit­tee would have felt com­pelled to ap­pear to be trans­par­ent. In­stead, a veil of se­cre­cy ap­pears to have been placed over the com­mit­tee's de­lib­er­a­tions, with the body seem­ing on­ly to have spo­ken to the Re-route Move­ment in con­duct­ing its probe.

The fact that so lit­tle is known about who the com­mit­tee con­sult­ed, what re­ports were re­viewed and what ques­tions were asked and an­swered, seems to in­di­cate the com­mit­tee could have ben­e­fit­ted from some greater trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty in the probe.