Casan­dra Thomp­son�Forbes

New­ly-sworn in mem­bers of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) are be­ing told the elec­tions are over and it is time to gov­ern the is­land.

The call was made by Pres­i­dent An­tho­ny Car­mona yes­ter­day, as he ad­dressed those present at the tenth in­au­gu­ra­tion of the THA.

Car­mona said he was re­lieved the process was over, adding the vic­tors should now get to work. He al­so strong­ly ob­ject­ed to some of the ut­ter­ings made dur­ing the re­cent cam­paign trail.

"In con­grat­u­lat­ing all the suc­cess­ful can­di­dates in the THA elec­tions af­ter a hard-fought bat­tle among the par­ties, where some­times rea­son fled, as so of­ten hap­pens when ad­ver­sar­i­al pol­i­tics oc­curs on the hus­tings, when there are things that are said that should nev­er be said and where vit­ri­ol and ran­cour be­came op­pres­sive to the law-abid­ing cit­i­zens watch­ing on and we do take small com­fort, we re­sign to warm char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of it be­ing the re­sult of a sil­ly sea­son. It is how­ev­er over," he said

He said like the rest of Trinidad and To­ba­go, he wel­comed the sense of calm, har­mo­ny and cel­e­bra­tion which was be­ing re­alised by the in­au­gu­ra­tion cer­e­mo­ny. He said there was al­so a need to recog­nise that both Trinidad and To­ba­go need each oth­er to be suc­cess­ful.

"In our West­min­ster form of gov­er­nance, what is ex­er­cised is not re­al­ly a sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers, but an in­ter­de­pen­dence of pow­ers and prac­ti­cal­ly, what binds and keeps our democ­ra­cy to­geth­er is the prac­tice of in­de­pen­dence of pow­ers.

"No one in gov­er­nance should ever as­pire to be an is­land. The un­wa­ver­ing sup­port of in­sti­tu­tion­al sys­tems ground­ed in­to the in­ter­de­pen­den­cies is crit­i­cal in up­hold­ing the tenets of a prac­ti­cal, sus­tain­able democ­ra­cy," Car­mona said.

He al­so touched on the spi­ralling crime in the coun­try. he said it was pos­si­ble to re­duce crime but it would take the uni­fied and col­lab­o­ra­tive ap­proach by all sec­tors in so­ci­ety.