Thank you very much, Chair, honourable Member Bagnell. It is indeed our pleasure to be here this morning to be able to present our lived experiences from the centre for the debates commission. You have already introduced Angella Persad, who will also be appearing with me during the Q and A questions, and I will just let you know that our current chair is Mr. Nicholas Galt, but he only recently took up the position, and we thought it would be better if Angella handled it.
I would also like to say thank you very much to Andrew. Andrew has been very efficient in handling the million and one questions that we asked. When Andrew first contacted me, I wondered why you would want to hear from a small, developing country like Trinidad and Tobago. That was a question I actually asked him, and then it made sense. We are a Commonwealth country. Our debates commission was already formed, and we realized that you can learn from anyone, small or large, as we all have our lessons we could learn, and we could move forward with that.
I'm really hoping that what we share with you will be good and will help you in some way. During the Q and A, I think, is where we will probably get out most of the questions and answers for you.
I think it's important for us to say a little bit about the political context within which the debates commission operates and how we were born. We are a democratic society. We have elections every five years as mandated. We have election campaigns as do most other countries, and during the election campaigns, there is a lot of mudslinging and personalities bringing down each other, the kind of thing that does not in any way inform the electorate to help them make better decisions when casting their votes.
In Trinidad and Tobago in particular, it's quite a “rum and roti“ environment. There's a lot of entertainment and music and so on going on during the campaigns. Wild promises are made, and there is no accountability afterwards. You can say anything you want in the campaign and there's no one afterwards to hold you accountable for that.
Trinidad and Tobago did not have leaders' debates before the debates commission was formed. As a matter of fact, they had no sort of debates. What you may have seen in the past would probably be media interviews with one of the leaders, but we never had anything where opposing leaders, prospective leaders, would get together and answer questions asked by an independent person. The whole issue of having any formal debating was definitely new to Trinidad and Tobago.
Another important thing is that in Trinidad and Tobago, we have no fixed dates for elections, and as in many other countries, including yours, where you don't have a fixed date now, it makes life very difficult for any debates' sponsor, because you really don't know when an election will be called. While from the legal point of view, the Parliament cannot sit for more than five years after the date of the first sitting, the PM could call elections any time before that and that, as I said, makes it very difficult for us.
The Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce is really the one that started the debates commission. They felt, and so did others in Trinidad and Tobago, that we were not discussing the issues that were really important, the things that we should be considering when we cast our vote. We recognize that there will always be party loyalists, but the marginals are about 30%, so those are the ones that we need to work at and let them hear from the prospective leaders what they have to offer their country. Under the strategic pillar of governance, the Trinidad and Tobago chamber set up the debates commission.
We did something like you did, although not mandated by government in any way, so it was a totally independent initiative. We set up an interim committee and we started going about researching what other countries had done and what was the best way to achieve all mandates. Through that we interacted with the U.S. debates commission, AGG, the National Democratic Institute, and the Jamaican-based commission, because Jamaica was the only country in the Caribbean that had set up a debates commission already, and we got help from them about how they did theirs.
We did not consult the politicians in any way. Quite frankly we did not go to the people either, and I think that's a very good initiative, which I see your Minister of Democratic Institutions is doing. By going to the people, you can get better support afterwards, because you will have heard from them.
Those are things we could have probably done a little better, but certainly we recognized that we needed to do something.
This interim committee was set up in 2009, and then in 2010—even though five years had not passed—the Prime Minister pulled the dates out of his back pocket, as we say in Trinidad, and called the election. We were not ready at that time, so we hurriedly set up and registered ourselves as an NGO, an independent, autonomous organization not in any way legally connected to the chamber, even though the chamber gave us full support throughout the entire process. Independence was important for us, as was autonomy.
We did not have funding at that point in time from anyone, so again the chamber helped us there. That brought up a whole issue as to how independent we were, because if we had taken funding from the chamber.... I was then CEO of the chamber, and I also led the debates commission. That's an issue we needed to look at, and we probably made a mistake there. When you say “independent”, you have to really ensure that the commission and the commissioners who are on it are truly independent.
We set the criteria for our commissioners. It was very important that they not be politically aligned in any way, and that they appear to be independent—not only say that they are, but appear to the public to be independent. We went about and quickly founded the debates commission. We had our values—democracy, transparency, objectivity, and independence—and we ensured that all our commissioners subscribed to them and signed on to that code.
In Trinidad and Tobago, our debates commission has no legal standing. It is not established in law. It is not established by any electoral mandate, or anything at all. It really relies totally on the support of the public and the people to demand a debate. This is something that is really very important. We are in the process of doing a strategic plan for the next three to four years, and one of the questions that we have on the table is whether we should also pursue putting some legislation in place whereby the leaders will have to debate. As I go on, you will see the difficulty we have had in having the leaders debate. Also, because we did not go to the people initially, I don't think we got the groundswell from the population to ensure that a debate would be held.
What we have is a group of independent organizations—religious, civic, and others—that got together and formed what is called a “Code of Ethical Political Conduct”, and the political parties all signed on to that. In it, there is a clause that says the leaders must take part in the leaders' debate. However, at the time this was set up, which was really just in 2014, it only said a leaders' debate organized by a debates commission. Subsequent to the last elections in 2015, when we had difficulty in getting the leaders' debate off, we were able to convince them that we must have consistency in who organizes the debates. You cannot really have various bodies—one term it's this body and next term another body. We need a consistent approach and one organization that has rules. We got them to agree that it should be the Trinidad and Tobago Debates Commission that will organize debates, and that was insisted. That has not been tested as yet, because we have not had elections since then, so we will see afterwards.
The consistency was important because during different periods in the last five years there have been other organizations that have been saying they would like to do leaders' debates. From the University of the West Indies, a group of youth wanted to do a debate. Again, it would start off and nothing would happen, so we really were convinced that a debates commission was the organization to do it.
We have set rules that have been laid down and agreed upon by all the commissioners. We also have rules for the commissioners themselves that they have to abide by.
For instance, the commissioners cannot attend political campaigns. Trinidad is a very small island of 1.3 million people, and if you go to a party's campaign someone is going to see you and come back and say afterwards that you are not really independent.
We also set rules and criteria for the leaders who will be participating in the debates. We felt that you must be contesting at least 50% of the seats that are up for voting, or you would have achieved at least a 12.5% positive polling in the last two polls. That latter proved to be a challenge for us because polling is not done on an everyday basis in Trinidad and Tobago, and we did not have polls done immediately before.
The 50% of the seats also posed a challenge because it has to be that these are parties that have said they will contest, and you will not know that for sure until nomination date. Nomination date is very close to the election, so you really negotiate with parties, not being 100% sure how many parties will be debating. You may be pretty sure about two parties because we are mainly a two-party system, but the others you would not know about.
We formulated an MOU for the parties to sign, again because we did not have any legislation. We did have the MOU signed by one party, not by all.
The debates commissioners are the ones who will choose the moderator and the questioners. We have had different types of debates. In one case we had one moderator who would moderate and ask the questions, and in other cases we've had a moderator who did strictly the presentation, and questioners who would ask the questions.
The debates commissioners are not involved in any way in coming up with the questions. That's strictly up to the moderator and the questioners. Through social media, we invite the public to send in their questions. We also get together with students to look at possible questions.
Financing is done strictly by corporate T and T—no government financing at all—because we have to maintain our independence. Corporate T and T has been very good so far in helping us with our debates.
We have held three debates so far, one in 2010 immediately as we formed in 2010. We did not get the leaders' debate after the general election but soon thereafter there were local government elections and we got a debate for that. Then in 2013 we had two debates and these were more or less national or provincial debates for Tobago, our sister island. We held a leaders' debate in Tobago and then we had another local government election debate.
We have not been successful in having any leaders' debates to date and that took us right back to the drawing board to ask why our lack of success. Besides the fact that it is not mandated, we really did not bring the media in early enough and the media is an integral party in having these debates. They're the ones we depend on to have their morning shows, all the talk shows, and the advertisements to get the public aware and talking about why we should have debates, and by political analysts to do the front sessions with them.
We did not have the voice of the people. That was not strong enough. I shouldn't say we did not have it because we did have a certain amount but the voice was not strong enough to demand a debate from the potential leaders.
In our strategic plan we are addressing them within a very strong relationship with the media, and directly with publishers and broadcasters. We are also getting the youth involved, getting more social media, and getting the people involved so we can have a stronger relationship with them through civic organizations and the like.
The debates are important to this country. We want to get involved in pre-elections, during elections, and post-elections, so we really want to be part of the entire governance process and these debates will not only be with the leaders. Some of them would probably be with other persons within the parties or political analysts or whoever we deem to be proper to handle that particular type of debate.
We are getting ready for 2020, our next general election, but prior to that we hope to have at least two debates so we can get the public involved, and when 2020 comes around they will be ready for us.
On behalf of the Trinidad and Tobago Debates Commission, I again thank you for wanting to hear our views.
I will now turn it back to you, Chair, for the important Q and A part.
