Move on fixed election dates

YOU HAVE to assume that Jamaica’s political leaders take local government, or at least the idea of it, seriously. In 2015 they went as far as to root the institution in the island’s Constitution.

In practice, however, there are real questions about the depth of their commitment to the system: not only as a conduit through which to deliver services, but part of the democratic arrangement that oughtn’t be readily trifled with. Indeed, when Jamaicans vote in municipal elections in a fortnight, it will be 39 months after the four-year life of the councils should have ended, but prolonged by a series of parliamentary actions by the national government.

So, the councils of the parish municipal corporations, as well as the one for the community of Portmore, St Catherine, will have existed for over 81 per cent longer than should have been the case. Put another way, the opportunity for voters to pronounce on the performance of their divisional representatives was delayed by over three years.

That it happened this way was, in part – and in character with much of the current campaign – influenced by national political calculations, rather than real constraints or local concerns. While the COVID-19 pandemic may have contributed to the initial of four postponements, there is little doubt that the administration subsequently hedged while it assessed its chances at the polls, hoping for the best environment within which to win. Time, essentially, caught up with the government.

ISN’T THE FIRST TIME

It isn’t, however, the first time that a national governing party has delayed local government elections for a prolonged spell. The manoeuvre hasn’t only been used by the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). The opposition People’s National Party (PNP), which recently at bayed Prime Minister Andrew Holness and the JLP to call the polls, has done it, too.

That is why the circumstance of parties being able to use, or manipulate, local government elections as a sort of weather vane for their prospects in the national polls should be an issue of debate in this campaign. The interest of democracy insists on greater certainty on the timing of both the municipal and national polls. The parties must declare their positions on the issue.

In fact, it should be among the questions explicitly posed to the political leaders and/or their surrogates at any debate on local government, including a demand for precisely how they would guarantee fixed-date elections and timetable for getting done.

The surest guarantee is by anchoring the requirement in the Constitution and tied to a similar arrangement for national parliamentary elections. That way, both elections could be held at the same time, saving taxpayers billions of dollars by not having to spend on two elections within a year of each other.

Indeed, a fixed, unadjustable cycle for elections, except in the most dire of circumstances, ought to appeal to, and be embraced by, Prime Minister Holness. While in opposition he pledged, if he won the government, to implement such a system for parliamentary elections.

“Within our first 100 days of government, we will start the legislative process to fix the date for general elections in Jamaica,” Mr Holness told a campaign rally a fortnight before his party’s victory. “This will bring greater certainty to the political process...”

LITTLE HAS HAPPENED

It is more than seven years since Mr Holness made that pledge. Little has happened since then to move the process forward.

The government will probably argue that it has been constrained by two deeply entrenched clauses in the Constitution – Section 64 (2) dealing with the life of a Parliament; and 65 (1), covering how much time after the dissolution of Parliament an election must be held. Changing them, on its face, would have to be confirmed by a referendum.

Those considerations, however, must have been known to Mr Holness when he made the pledge. His predecessor as leader of the JLP, Bruce Golding, in whose Cabinet Mr Holness served, was a fervent proponent of a fixed date for parliamentary elections. Seven years before Mr Holness’ 100-day declaration, Mr Golding had raised the constitutional issue as a probable hurdle to be crossed towards implementing the idea.

Having entered government, Mr Holness – as tends to be the case with Jamaican administrations since the 1961 vote for island’s withdrawal from the West Indies Federation – probably feared that a referendum would focus on extraneous matters and be used by the opposition as a plebiscite on his administration. Fixed-day elections, it will probably argue, will now be part of a broader constitutional reform,

Except that as a standalone question, a fixed date for any election, national or local, is hardly one that Mark Golding, the opposition leader, could rally against. He, after all, not only insisted on ending the delay of the municipal polls, but threatened to take the matter to court if they were not called. A declaratory judgment from the courts, if such a suit was entertained, on whether a prolonged postponement of local elections infringed on democratic rights of citizens would have been useful.

While the larger constitutional matters are being worked through, the government should take to Parliament legislation to make it more difficult to delay municipal elections. The law must establish clear and transparent criteria to be met before a postponement must be entertained and whether these requirements have met should be interrogated during hearings by the relevant parliamentary committee, at which interest groups, including the Electoral Commission of Jamaica, are allowed to offer their positions.