‘We are family’ – Hon. Mia Mottley

Remarks by the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, QC, MP, Prime Minister of Barbados, at the Opening Session of the 31st Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community, at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre, Barbados

Thank you very much.

Distinguished colleague Heads, the
Secretary-General of CARICOM, the distinguished Secretary-General of the
Commonwealth, distinguished Foreign Minister of Canada, the distinguished
former Prime Minister of Ireland, the Heads of all of the regional
institutions: CARPHA, Impacts, Caribbean Development Bank, University of the
West Indies, CARICOM Development Fund, the Regional Security System, our
distinguished representatives from the US E and our representatives from the
Caribbean Private Sector Movement and the Caribbean Congress of Labour and
above all else, the young people of the Caribbean as represented here by the
school children of Barbados.

I want to, first of all, thank the
outgoing chair of CARICOM, the Honourable Allen Chastanet, for his passion and
commitment over the course of the last six months with respect in particular to
the fight against the climate crisis and for the fiscal sovereignty challenges
that he has continued to carry the baton for us, whether on either side of the
Atlantic as it relates to the list that I would prefer not to refer to colour,
because we don't accept the notion of the list being any colour for us.

I'd like to thank also members of the
CARICOM Secretariat, because the truth is, without the hard work being done by
this Secretariat, we would not be in a position to be here this morning to
address each other and to advance the cause of Caribbean people.

We have reached an interesting point in
2020, and it is said that 2020 is usually associated with perfecting a finer
vision of ourselves. In this instance, we need not only to perfect a finer
vision of ourselves, but to act to create that finer vision. And it is against
this background that we meet here at Bridgetown, recognising that we face a
world in which challenges continue to present themselves. When we left Castries
in July last year, we had no clue that we would be facing a potential pandemic
in the world with COVID-19. We didn't have any idea that our ability to
function as a single domestic space would be threatened by that development.

Equally, we didn't realise that we would
be able to rely on one of our regional institutions to be first the front-line
protection and another regional institution to be the platform and bedrock upon
which we can fight this virus. And what am I referring to?

The creation of the Implementation
Agency for Crime and Security in 2006, followed by the Joint Regional
Communications Center, was done initially to prepare us for Cricket World Cup
2007. But we understood then that its legacy and its enduring benefits would
serve a Caribbean community for much longer. It is that agency that is able to
track the movement of people, thereby putting our border security officials on
notice as to where risk is likely to occur with people entering our countries.
The ability for that agency to be linked in real time to Interpol, to the US
Department of Homeland Security and to be able to have access to the travel
histories of persons allows us to be able to make that determination at the
level of our border security officials who we thank for being our frontline
warriors in the protection of our people. At the same time, CARPHA, a
relatively new regional institution as well, has proven its worth to us by
being able to ensure that along with the Pan American Health Organization, a
number of our countries are today now in a position to be able to test quickly
for whether persons within our jurisdiction have been infected with this dangerous
virus.

I start at this point because I want our
Heads to focus on the challenge and the response. And I want us today to
remember that "F" comes before "I" and that I mean,
specifically that family comes before ideology. This is a critical, critical moment
for us as a community to understand that whether the challenges be with respect
to chronic NCDs, which is the insidious killer among too many of our people, or
whether the challenge be the more talked about and definite existential crisis
of climate affecting us, not just through hurricanes as it literally, literally
has torn many of our countries apart from Dorian with Bahamas to Maria and Irma
with Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda and the British Virgin Islands, and too
many of our countries to mention, or whether it is violence that has genuinely
become a public health disorder with a level of killings across our community
that is unacceptable for any community, any part of the world, or whether it is
the challenges to our fiscal sovereignty or whether it is the challenges to
multilateralism that are taking and making aim at the integrity of our freedom
of association are small groupings. We have to determine how best to confront
these challenges.

I believe on behalf of the people of
Barbados that there is always strength in unity. We have come from a movement
across this region in the 1930s where we face common challenges and where our
people, without the benefit of political organization or labour movements,
found a way to respond and to be able to signal that we were prepared to take
control of our destiny. I say to us today that if those who had no benefit or
political organization and those who had no benefit of labour movements could
find it possible to rise to the challenge to meet those challenges, which in
some instances were far more devastating to the average citizen than these that
we speak of today, that we ought to be able to find the resolve to understand
that we meet here today, not because we share a common ideology, but we meet
here today because we are family. We are kith and kin.

And whether it is at the level of
countries or it is at the level of homes and communities, being kith and kin
must stand for something. We will not always have sunny days. But it is when
the days are cloudy that we determine how best to move forward with the
character that defines us as being resilient and has been able to reach the
mountaintop in spite of the valleys that we have to traverse on our way to the
mountain top. I say so conscious that we have some self-examination to do as
well. The CARICOM Secretariat, which keeps us together, is now functioning with
30 million Eastern Caribbean dollars less than it did 10 years ago. The CARICOM
Secretariat is now functioning with 40 people less than it did 30 years ago.

But we demand more of them against the
challenges that I identified at the outset of my speech. And we therefore need
to ask ourselves whether we have the appropriate governance and funding models
to ensure the sustainability of this family movement that is so vital to our
being able to bring prosperity to our citizens. I ask us today whether the time
has not come for us to recall the Rose Hall Declaration in Jamaica in 2003 that
led to Prime Minister Gonzalves's leading a prime ministerial subcommittee on the
entire issue of governance within our community and our ability to be able to
ensure effective execution and seamless implementation of decisions taken by
Heads of government at this our highest decision making body within our
community.

Indeed, I ask us to reflect on the
parallel with our own sovereign entities. To have parliaments without an
executive that is functioning is to have an idle exercise in frustration for
our people. It simply could not work. And for us to believe that we can have a
heads of government conference twice a year that will allow us to make
decisions that have the force of law without the capacity to seamlessly execute
is an idle exercise for us as well.

I therefore hope that we can summon the
will within us to ask Prime Minister Gonzalves to dust off the papers and the
technical working groups, and to come once again to us with a modality that can
allow a more effective implementation of the decisions of heads of government,
particularly as it relates to the CARICOM Single Market and Single Economy.

I am equally conscious that in life we
have to be able to explain to people that in this modern world where everyone
expects instantaneous action, that we are involved in activity that more often
than not is about respect for process in order to attain the results that we
want. It is against that background that we continue to labour in the vineyards
of being able to create a more seamless opportunity for doing business and
moving and living and enjoying this region for our people. We believe that our
ability to have regional communication that is affordable and accessible is an
absolute priority. It is against that background that we also recognize that
the digital economy can play a new and powerful role in the development of our
economies, period.

But power comes with responsibility.

Our teams have been working with
operators in the telecommunications sector across the region and indeed, Prime
Minister Mitchell, who is the lead prime minister in this area, has, along with
the CSME team, worked with the operators to shortly announce a modest fixed
single CARICOM roaming rate for all CARICOM nationals to cover the cost of data
for popular social media platforms including those that offer messaging and
calls. The rate will include an amount of local and regional voice calls, and
over time this CARICOM rate will include more services. This is what it means
to be family taking decisions. At Castries, we recognized and reflected that
the roaming rates within this region are punitive and that in many instances
people are bankrupted when they go from country to country because they have no
idea as to what these roaming rates will present themselves to be.

Once we have reached agreement on the
rate and service level, the operators will make the necessary technological
changes and we have full expectation that the new fixed single CARICOM rate can
go live in this year 2020. The appropriate regulation, however, of the digital
economy extends beyond prices, services and taxes. Prime Minister Mitchell
recognises this, as do other lead prime ministers for different areas that are
affecting our society. Our people must therefore be safe from cyberbullying,
from disinformation, from graphically violent language and images, from hate
speech, from discriminatory and racial and xenophobic speech. Prime Minister
Mitchell's team shall be working with all of the other organisations within the
region and the international community to ensure that we keep abreast of these
developments.

Similarly, we have recognised that we
need to be able to resolve the issue of transport and that is a work in
progress. While all of the members of the Conference of Heads are not
shareholders in LIAT, it is fair that is necessary for me to report that LIAT
now has a new board with a renewed mandate to be able to ensure that regional
affordable transportation is made available to Caribbean people. To run a
country without transport is to condemn that country. Similarly, to run a
Community without affordable transport is to condemn that community.

Indeed, we are conscious as we welcome
the Honorable François Philip Champagne with us today, that he is here in the
stead of his prime minister, who, because of similar reasons for blockade of
transport, cannot be with us and we empathize with the people of Canada as they
resolve this difficult challenge that they are facing this week.

We look forward, however, not just to be
unable to resolve matters of air transport, but we also want to move
aggressively towards the resolution of the maritime transport issues. The
private sector who will be presenting to us later this morning on the
production integration plans that we settled at Port of Spain in the St. Anne's
Declaration of December 2018 will have the opportunity to be able to reinforce
that we need to have the logistics for the movement of our goods and our people
in place if we are going to be successful with respect to expanding the
economic pie of the region through their continued investment.

Similarly, the CSME and CARICOM depends
on the ability to recognise that in a single market and a single economy, there
will be winners and there will be losers. Those who had the precedence to
settle the revised treaty of Chaguaramas understood this by the inclusion of
Chapter 7 in that revised treaty. For those unaware, Chapter 7 establishes the
CARICOM Development Fund that is intended to assist disadvantaged countries,
disadvantaged sectors and disadvantaged regions. With the best will in the
world, this fund cannot be sustained purely from the contributions of the more
developed countries as they are known in the revised treaty of Chaguaramas.

It is against this background that I
hope that this meeting will reflect and resolve on the best way to ensure that
the CARICOM Development Fund is capable of better accessing funds both
regionally and internationally, to ensure that those who may have been affected
or been disadvantaged as a result of our commitment to come together can
benefit by being able to have access to concessional funding that they would
not otherwise have access to.

Indeed, the reality is, that we have
discussed on so many occasions that there are over 50 billion US dollars in
savings within this community, most of which are attracting no more than 0.1
percent, and we give the return on investment to foreign depositors when we
pick up foreign loans but we are not finding a way to unlock the savings of
Caribbean people, to finance the development of Caribbean people. We trust and
pray that this conference will make appreciable progress in that regard this
day and tomorrow.

I'd like to finally reflect on the
threats once again as I close.

Threats are part of life, we take risks
every day. Indeed, our grandparents taught us that nothing ventured, nothing
gained. I hope and pray, particularly in the presence of these young people for
whom we act today, but who will act for us tomorrow, that we take courage and
recognize that it is in the interests of those who are not of this community to
advance their own individual causes. The only people capable of defending our
causes and our future and our development is us ourselves. We may not do it overnight.
We may not do it in a year. We may not even do it in a decade, but if we
recognize that this integration movement is one of the most successful
integration movements that was established in the 20th century, we then better
appreciate the responsibility that we have to care it, to nurture it and not
allow for any kind of political or diplomatic embolism to threaten its
existence.

I trust and pray that we come to this
moment, therefore, conscious that as family, nothing can separate us and no one
shall get in between us. It is against this background that we therefore
recognize that it is principles that shall guide us always. And if we are
faithful to those principles, then we shall always find a way home. Principles
may be inconvenient, but they guarantee our protection and our integrity. I
trust and pray, therefore, that in spite of the problems either of our region,
within our community or outside of our region and community in our globe,
global community, that we will remember that we stand here because those who
fought in the 1930s and those who created the political institutions that
flowed therefrom understood that without unity they could achieve nothing but
with unity they could turn back the mighty hands of global empires who sought
to suppress people for centuries.

Let us today pray that we hold on to
those examples. And in holding on to those examples that we use the opportunity
to bring along our brothers and sisters within the region conscious and I use
know the words of that distinguished Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite, who has now
gone to a different place and who we will officially bury on Friday. I can find
no better way to end than to use his language of his great poetry, included in
his 1999 "nine mesongs fe the new millennium".

And I quote, "If you live on an
island. Love it. Love it. Love it. But remember, no man is an island. And that
no island belong to one man. Be always part of something larger than yourself.
Something that will make you larger than yourself. Part of the island. Part of
the region. Part of the main. Educate yourself, your children and your
community into these things in the way they should go, in the way we should
grow. So think on these things. Dream on these things. But above all else, act
on these dreams."

Let us, as a conference of heads of
government of the Caribbean Community, represent the dreams and aspirations of
the Caribbean people. Let us act on these dreams. Thank you.