In an ad­dress to the na­tion as act­ing Pres­i­dent, Tim­o­thy Hamel-Smith has called for an in­crease in the num­ber of par­lia­men­tar­i­ans from 41 to 100. "One of the key roles of our par­lia­men­tar­i­ans is to have over­sight of ex­ec­u­tive ac­tion, both in terms of leg­is­la­tion and per­for­mance of gov­ern­men­tal func­tions," he said.

The most sig­nif­i­cant way in which this is achieved is through par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tees. Re­gret­tably over the last 50 years, the Com­mit­tee sys­tem has not worked in the man­ner in which its role was orig­i­nal­ly en­vis­aged. I be­lieve that the main rea­son for this short­com­ing is that the num­ber of par­lia­men­tar­i­ans avail­able to per­form this func­tion is woe­ful­ly in­ad­e­quate...In Trinidad and To­ba­go the num­ber of non-ex­ec­u­tive par­lia­men­tar­i­ans avail­able to serve on par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tees is about 45 mem­bers, in oth­er words we have less that half of the min­i­mum num­ber re­quired to achieve an ef­fec­tive par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee sys­tem. In light of this in my view our Con­sti­tu­tion needs to pro­vide for at least 100 non-ex­ec­u­tive par­lia­men­tar­i­ans."

"In or­der to achieve the goal of hav­ing 100 par­lia­men­tar­i­ans I rec­om­mend that we re­tain the ex­ist­ing 41 Con­stituen­cies but in­tro­duce a list sys­tem in which each po­lit­i­cal par­ty pri­or to the gen­er­al elec­tion presents a list in al­pha­bet­i­cal or­der of the in­di­vid­u­als from which it in­tends to se­lect its pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of par­lia­men­tar­i­ans to sit in both Hous­es of Par­lia­ment, and that the al­lo­ca­tion of seats be based on the num­ber of votes which such par­ty wins in the gen­er­al elec­tion.

Each House in the Par­lia­ment could be con­fig­ured in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways on the ba­sis of the list mem­bers, the cru­cial fac­tor in my es­ti­ma­tion be­ing to re­tain the role of the In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors which helps to main­tain a lev­el of equi­lib­ri­um in the gov­er­nance sys­tem."

Hamel-Smith, who is in favour of an ex­pand­ed pres­i­den­cy, al­so pro­posed pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. "It is be­cause the role of the In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors is so cru­cial that I am re­luc­tant to pur­sue the no­tion of an ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­dent," he said. "In­deed, I be­lieve that the role of the Pres­i­dent un­der our cur­rent Con­sti­tu­tion should be ex­pand­ed.

I am al­so mind­ful of the re­cent re­marks by Pres­i­dent Max Richards as to the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege and note the rec­om­men­da­tion of past Con­sti­tu­tion­al Com­mis­sions that lo­cal gov­ern­ment mem­bers form part of the Elec­toral Col­lege. I would like to sug­gest fur­ther that con­sid­er­a­tion be giv­en to can­di­dates for the post of Pres­i­dent be­ing nom­i­nat­ed by civ­il so­ci­ety.

"The Elec­toral Col­lege would then vote for the pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of its choice. The cre­ation of a Civ­il So­ci­ety Board (rep­re­sent­ing civ­il so­ci­ety) would be a mech­a­nism through which the voice of civ­il so­ci­ety could be heard and in this way add to the cit­i­zens feel­ing of par­tic­i­pa­tion in the in­sti­tu­tions of gov­ern­ment."

Re­gard­ing the ex­ec­u­tive arm of Gov­ern­ment, Hamel-Smith pro­posed that the Prime Min­is­ter be elect­ed not sim­ply by mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar con­stituen­cy, but by the en­tire elec­torate. "In­deed this seems to me to rep­re­sent the con­sen­sus of sen­ti­ments ex­pressed at the pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions on the Con­sti­tu­tion. Such an elec­tion could be held si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly with the Gen­er­al Elec­tion, vot­ing tak­ing place on the ba­sis of a pref­er­en­tial vot­ing sys­tem, rather than first past the post which can re­sult in the win­ner rep­re­sent­ing a mi­nor­i­ty of the elec­torate."

In ad­di­tion, he pro­posed a phased ap­proach for Cari­com coun­tries to cut the "um­bil­i­cal cord" of the Privy Coun­cil and adopt the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice as their fi­nal court of ap­peal. His state­ment al­so in­clud­ed pro­pos­als for the trans­for­ma­tion of com­mis­sions, par­ty fi­nanc­ing and pro­cure­ment. Ex­tracts from Hamel Smith's state­ment will be pub­lished in to­mor­row's pa­per.