East End MLA Arden McLean left party over the issue
Premier Alden McLaughlin says a “one man, one vote” motion filed in Legislative Assembly last week was a lot more about politics than it was about policy.
“In many respects, this was a full frontal assault on [me],” Mr. McLaughlin said. “Because ‘Alden’ ought not to be premier … [East End MLA] Arden [McLean] ought to be premier.”
Mr. McLean’s private members motion exposed some cracks in the Cayman Islands’ coalition government, as Legislative Assembly members voted a 6-to-6 tie on the proposal, which sought to implement single-member voting districts within three months of passage. The tie vote required Speaker of the House Juliana O’Connor-Connolly’s intervention to vote it down.
Private members motions are advisory in nature and even if they are approved, they only require government consideration. For instance, a motion supporting minimum wage was passed during the former United Democratic Party government’s term but never acted upon.
Two members of the Progressives-led government backbench voted with Mr. McLean on the motion. Four Cabinet ministers were absent for the vote, with three of them attributing their absence to their legislative inexperience. The fourth member was off island Friday.
During debate on the motion, Mr. McLean, a former member of the Progressives, revealed that he left the party after forming the view that then-opposition party leader McLaughlin did not support “one man, one vote” single-member constituencies.
Mr. McLean said in 2012 he asked Mr. McLaughlin whether they could use the Progressives grass-roots political contacts in the community to push both “one man, one vote” and a proposal to limit the number of members of the Legislative Assembly to 15.
The Cayman Islands Constitution Order, 2009, increased the number of Legislative Assembly representatives from 15 to 18, leading to the addition of two assembly seats in Cayman’s largest voting district, George Town, and one seat in its second-largest district, Bodden Town. The Progressives party won all four seats in Bodden Town during the May 2013 general election and four of the six available seats in George Town.
Mr. McLean said Mr. McLaughlin did not agree to reducing the number of elected members to 15 and did not allow his party’s political machine to be used for that purpose. That prompted the East End member, who at one time was slated to become deputy opposition leader, to leave the Progressives.
“This is about power and staying therein,” Mr. McLean said. “That premier never had any intention of implementing ‘one man, one vote.’”
Mr. McLaughlin maintained Friday that such statements simply are not true. However, he said the Progressives were likely to move away from a “pure” system of 18 or 19 single-member voting districts to a hybrid that could include several at-large voting districts.
“We promised single-member constituencies and that’s what we’ve proposed to deliver,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “We have a coalition government. My challenge all the time is to try and reach a degree of consensus. You can’t always get 13 members to agree.”
Asked if he believed Messrs. McLean and Miller were pushing single-member voting districts because they believe it is their best chance to become members of a ruling government in the future, Mr. McLaughlin said, “They may think that, but all the evidence I’ve looked at tells me otherwise.”
Various examples in Caribbean countries and British Overseas Territories indicate that single-member voting districts are the most common democratic systems and tend to be dominated by two political parties within those countries. Cayman has a multimember voting system in which electors in more populous districts get more votes than those in smaller districts.
‘One man, one vote’ dominates
In Jamaica, members of the House of Representatives are elected from single-member districts. Jamaica also has 21 senators; 13 of whom are named by the prime minister and eight by the opposition government.
In a December 2011 vote, the Jamaican People’s National Party received about 53 percent of the vote, while about 47 percent of the vote went to the Jamaica Labour Party. Four other political parties that contested the election received only about 1,000 votes among them out of more than 800,000 votes cast.
Trinidad and Tobago’s House of Representatives is elected for a maximum of five-year terms in single-seat constituencies. There is also a senate with the majority of members appointed on the advice of the prime minister.
Bermuda, a British Overseas Territory in the Atlantic, has a 36-member House of Assembly elected for five-year terms in single-member districts. The Bermudian Senate has 11 appointed members.
The British Virgin Islands elects 13 of its 15 House of Assembly members. Nine members are from single-seat constituencies and four are elected as at-large members to represent the islands as a whole. The attorney general and a House speaker are chosen from outside the elected representatives. The BVI system is also dominated by two political parties.
The Turks and Caicos Islands, also British, recently regained local control of their elections following the U.K.’s imposition of direct rule between 2009 and 2012. Turks also has 15 single-member constituencies with the Progressive National Party and the People’s Democratic Movement generally vying for power. No other party ran candidates during the territory’s 2007 elections.
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Alden has a lot of nerve to complain about political assaults after the years of Mckeeva Bush bashing he did , throughout his time as the opposition all he did was attack Bush at every turn in order to discredit him and any ideas or proposals he put on the table including the Shetty Hospital which he now shows so much support for and the For Cayman Investment Alliance, this however was squashed in order to secure the Bodden Town vote even at the sacrifice of the rest of the nation’s wellbeing. My impression of him at this point which I got from watching him during the last PPM rule, while he was the opposition and now again as the Premier is that he is a hypocrite that’s getting a taste of his own medicine. He can dish it but he can’t take it. Surprisingly Mckeeva is actually gaining more respect by not handing his role as the opposition the same way Alden did. I am still waiting to the the outcome of all the so called investigations into Bush which I’m starting to believe was no more than a witch hunt with a planned result of having a more docile premier in office that would never disagree with UK points of view. And that wasn’t Bush, Ezzard are Mclean.
Alden is contradicting himself, he says on the news that voter reform may not come before the next election and he blames it on those that voted for it. He says that he was under the impression that everyone had agreed to not support SMC’s and he cannot drive through a position that does not have the support of the majority of his team, so how does this show anything other than he had no plans of implementing it and wasn’t it his team that said they all supported it during the election with promises of implementing if it they were elected.. I actually had to laugh when he said that this was a full frontal assault on the government because they’ve been so solid and been so good on every other issue but this is just something that they have identified as a possible Achilles heel.
I think the real issue here is not the substance of the motion, but rather the principle. When OMOV was out for referendum, the PPM pledged to support it because it was a way of undermining McKeeva Bush’s stranglehold on the islands.
Now that Alden and his silent cohorts realize that OMOV is a serious threat to the party system that he is now taking advantage of, it is suddenly a problem.
May I remind him that the vast majority of the island voted for change and now Alden ignores them. If this is what politics is all about, promising change and then back-tracking, it’s no wonder the people are frustrated.
I simply don’t understand the gall of this approach. It cannot be said that the will of the people is being represented, but rather the will of the few.
Come on people, if you are happy with this government, it’s fine, but if not please have your say. There are many places in the world where people just vanish for speaking out. Let us not allow Cayman to be one of those places.