Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) president general Ancel Roget has described the 2021/2022 Budget presentation as a con.
Speaking during the union’s post-Budget forum yesterday, Roget said there were no specific timelines announced for relief measures to be implemented and the presentation falls flat for ordinary citizens who are struggling to survive.
“For us, the things that matter to the people, the working man, the masses, there is no real detail, no real timeline around how that is going to be implemented and how that is going to benefit the ordinary citizen,” Roget said.
Finance Minister Colm Imbert presented the $52.4 billion Budget in Parliament on Monday with the theme: “Resilience in the Face of a Global Pandemic.”
Yesterday, Roget said a major concern among the population was job creation, which the Government did not address.
He said it was a hodgepodge of initiatives, with projections for relief outside of the time-period for the budget.
“How could people accept that? So we have increases in a specific period but initiatives that you are promising will come on stream outside of the specific period? We believe that once again, a con job has been done on the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago,” Roget said.
The union leader said the announcement from Imbert that the chief personnel officer has been instructed to start wage negotiations in the public sector did not satisfy the union.
He also renewed his call for the Government to hold its hand on the implementation of property tax, saying it should be implemented at a later date and on a phased basis.
Roget said the trade union movement was putting citizens on alert that they need to stand up again for what is right in T&T.
“We are in a State of Emergency, that’s another thing that we have to consider because some of these measures, we would certainly have been outside in the streets protesting some of these measures, property tax, increased fuel costs, increased water rates, increased electricity rates, we would have been on the streets. But because they expect that, they extended the State of Emergency,” Roget said.
He said this extension means citizens cannot respond to the budget. Roget said when the SoE is over, the trade union will do what they must.
He also lent his voice to the chorus of calls for the resignation of the Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi over the Police Service Commission debacle.
Al-Rawi has been accused of creating faulty legislation to allow the appointment of an acting Commissioner of Police while the selection process for a Commissioner was ongoing. The entire Police Service Commission has since resigned and there has been no word from the Office of the President about when a new commission will be appointed.
“I cannot speak here this morning without mentioning that were it another government with another attorney general, the PNM would have been burning the place down calling for his resignation and therefore, we call for the removal and the resignation of the current Attorney General, Faris Al-Rawi,” Roget said.
Also speaking during the forum was economist Hayden Blades. Blades accused the Finance Minister of pandering to a few “squeaky wheels” who were clamouring for changes in their sectors in the months before the budget.
He said among these were the Used Car Dealers’ Association and the Registered Nurses’ Association.
As part of the Budget, Imbert announced that all customs duties, motor vehicle tax and VAT will be removed on the importation of battery-powered electric vehicles with an age limit of no more than two years from January 2022.
Blades said the two-year age limit on vehicles puts those vehicles out of the reach of the average citizen.
“Last night I heard one of the car dealers talking about this issue, and he was saying it now means that one of those electric vehicles not more than two years old, will cost the average person about $250,000. So if you really want one, make sure got a quarter million in your pocket to go and get your electric vehicle,” Blades said.
He said the Government was buying time and selling hope to citizens, while keeping a few sectors happy and forcing the rest of the population to tighten their belts.
“The question is how do you ensure that you continue to win the hearts and minds of Trinibagonian voters in this era, which is really an era of structural adjustment? We are not going to the IMF according to the Minister but we are imposing internally our own structural adjustments, which means that certain people are adjusting,” he said.
Caribbean Confederation of Credit Unions (CCCU) president Joseph Remy agreed with Blades’ assessment of the “squeaky wheels getting the grease.”
Remy said although there are several forward-thinking measures being announced, T&T has a major issue with executing those measures.
“When you put aside the measures for the squeaky wheel as Hayden says, the real test as a country is how do we get over our implementation deficit and moving away from having lofty ideas and ideals couched in a written language without any clear path to bring about any kind of realistic implementation,” Remy said.
Addressing the announcement of a $300 million agricultural stimulus package fund in 2022, Trinidad United Farmers’ Association president Shiraz Khan raised a number of questions about a similar incentive in the 2021 budget.
“Last year, the Government put $500 million as a stimulus for agriculture. Has anybody heard where that $500 million was spent? Has anybody told us from last year where the taxpayers’ $500 million was spent? You come back this year and telling us you are going to put $300 million into agriculture stimulus again, how much doltishness we will take as citizens of this country?” he asked.
Khan also questioned what the rest of the $1.249 billion allocation for the agriculture sector would be spent on. He said there were numerous issues facing farmers, including the rising number of incidents of praedial larceny.
“People are losing animals 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock in the night and you have an SoE, now it’s from 10 (pm) but before it was from 9 o’clock, we have that problem happening.”
