Gail Alexan­der

The ques­tion of in­creas­ing Phar­ma­cy Board fees must be a mem­ber­ship de­ci­sion and the Health Min­is­ter can’t do this uni­lat­er­al­ly, says Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh.

Re­ply­ing to Op­po­si­tion MP Lack­ram Bo­doe’s ques­tion on the is­sue Deyals­ingh said Min­istry has a le­gal opin­ion which stat­ed the Health Min­is­ter can’t in­crease fees uni­lat­er­al­ly. He said any such body has to go to its mem­ber­ship where au­dit­ed state­ments are laid, mem­bers can dis­cuss the mer­its and de­mer­its of fee in­creas­es and that po­si­tion with the ac­counts are sent to the line min­istry. If the Min­is­ter agrees, the po­si­tion is tak­en to Cab­i­net and leg­isla­tive changes done.

In writ­ten replies to Op­po­si­tion ques­tions, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour was asked to “pro­vide, for the pe­ri­od Sep­tem­ber 2015 to No­vem­ber, 2022 the num­ber of court mat­ters that have been won and lost by the State and the cost to the State of each mat­ter.”

Ar­mour replied:”This ques­tion as it is cur­rent­ly word­ed is very am­bigu­ous and as such it de­fies a ra­tio­nal an­swer. First­ly, the pe­ri­od in ques­tion spans sev­en years.

“In or­der to prop­er­ly pre­pare a ful­some re­sponse to the first part of the ques­tion, the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Min­istry of Le­gal Af­fairs as well as the Ju­di­cia­ry will have to al­lo­cate a sub­stan­tial amount of staff mem­bers to com­pile and col­late the in­for­ma­tion there­by ad­verse­ly im­pact­ing re­sources which are al­ready se­vere­ly con­strained and are be­ing al­lo­cat­ed to pro­duc­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive and ju­di­cial ef­fi­cien­cy and re­sults.

“As it per­tains to the sec­ond part of the ques­tion, I am un­aware as to what ex­act­ly the Mem­ber means by the word ‘cost’. Is it the cost in­curred by the State to re­tain at­tor­neys or is it the cost award­ed as dam­ages or fees? In the cir­cum­stances, it would be ad­vis­able for the Mem­ber to re­for­mu­late his ques­tion.”