EDITORIAL - Please, Mr Mair, provide substance

Gregory Mair shadows industry and commerce for the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), including the single-market components of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). This is an important portfolio that deserves far more cerebral attention than it has so far been afforded by Mr Mair.

Like many Jamaicans, including his party, Mr Mair is not particularly a fan of CARICOM. He does not believe that Jamaica gets a good deal from the integration process generally, but more specifically, its single-market arrangement, under which member countries export goods and services to each other without tariffs.

Six weeks ago, in Parliament, Mr Mair stopped just shy of calling for Jamaica's secession from the community. His big grouse is Jamaica's more than US$950-million deficit on visible trade with its regional partners, but primarily Trinidad and Tobago.

He, like many Jamaican firms, argues that Trinidad and Tobago uses its natural gas and oil to provide energy subsidies to its manufacturers, while denying that benefit to other CARICOM members. Additionally, many Jamaican exporters and some politicians claim that the Trinidadians erect non-tariff barriers to Jamaican goods.

Indeed, so intense has the anti-CARICOM sentiment become that the community's still relatively new secretary general, Irwin LaRocque, was driven to visit Jamaica, on the eve of last week's regional summit in St Lucia, for a reading of the attitudes of this country's leaders - political and private sector - on the integration process.

Mair privy to summit

This newspaper was not privy to the details of the discussions Ambassador LaRocque had with JLP leaders, including, we presume, Mr Mair. He would have known of the imminent summit and the subject to be covered by the leaders, including Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.

However, there was no sign of an effort on Mr Mair's part to influence those discussions, until the eve of the close of the summit and only after it was reported that Mrs Simpson Miller had pledged "Jamaica's commitment to regionalism as a core principle of policy".

"It is a cause worth fighting for," Mrs Simpson Miller said.

Mr Mair apparently feels that this is an open-ended commitment which Jamaica can ill-afford. He said: "... The (Revised) Treaty of Chaguaramas is useless unless the region recognises that while Jamaica is an open market for their goods and services, this market will close unless they, too, provide easy access to allow Jamaican producers to service their consumers."

But like Mr Mair's previous statements about CARICOM, this was another bit of unsupported rhetoric; he cited no specific breaches of the treaty, proposed remedies, and offered no robust analysis of the problem. Nor has Mr Mair, in any of his discussions of CARICOM and Jamaica's incapacity to compete in the region, explored how, if at all, domestic policy deficiencies may contribute to this.

It may be true that Trinidad and Tobago breaks the rules, subsidises its exporters and illegally keeps Jamaicans out. But mere emotive assertions do not necessarily translate to the muscled facts that win serious arguments.

Mr Mair may claim that there is no reason for him to engage in substance. We, however, believe that discourse and debate on a serious matter like Jamaica's relationship with CARICOM demands it.

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