Barbados risks undermining its push for parliamentary reform unless it first addresses chronic failures in the public service, St Michael South Central MP Marsha Caddle warned Tuesday.
During the House debate on the Parliamentary Reform Commission (PRC) report, Caddle told fellow lawmakers that many constituency issues landing on MPs’ desks stem from basic services not being delivered by the civil service.
She said: “It is perhaps an indictment on our system of democratic governance that it seems that we are now concerned mostly with fulfilling service requirements that really ought to be carried out by a strong and functioning public service. I dare say—and perhaps it’s a conversation that we don’t want to have, because it is a conversation that bears up a certain kind of electoral system—that some of the functions that are fulfilled by MPs would not need to be fulfilled by MPs if we had an executive that functioned in the way that it needed to function.”
In recounting her own canvas of constituents ahead of the 2023 Budget Estimates, she said residents were direct, and wanted to know how their money was spent and how quickly government agencies responded to their issues. Those conversations, she said, shaped the questions she raised during the debate.
She said: “If we had a system of public service delivery that was sufficiently resourced and structured to deliver for people such that no middle person is required…then our MPs would have to be assessed on the basis of the extent to which their advocacy on behalf of people becomes real in people’s lives through legislation and other kinds of representation that they make to the executive. That’s why we are here.”
Caddle warned that “tweaking” parliamentary procedures, such as adjusting constituency service funds, only papers over deeper failures. “We run the risk of accommodating dysfunction,” Caddle cautioned.
Reminding fellow MPs that good governance requires investment, she added: “Democratic governance doesn’t function in a vacuum. We say all the time, and perhaps people don’t like to hear this, but I think that each of us as Barbadians has to think about democratic governance, because if we do, there’s an investment that needs to be made in that governance.” (SB)
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