The Prime Minister also had some remarks for the social partners who keep issuing statements saying that the Integrity Commission is inactive, and that he hasn't kept true to his promise to reform the Public Accounts Committee.
Here's how he put it:...
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
"The Integrity Commission has been reconstituted, is working, and has already published for public knowledge and further action the names of those politicians who failed to comply with their obligations under the law. How so-called responsible people can claim to be unaware of these activities and strides, defeats me."
"Government, I should say in this context, is still agreeable to the expansion of the PAC, though the logistics of its conversion from a House to a bi-cameral entity are proving challenging."
But more than just being adversarial, the Prime Minister also outlined a new wave of infrastructural programs that will start soon - including a new Haulover Bridge:..
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
"Next month I sign the OFID loan for the Haulover Bridge replacement, and this will top off the ongoing Highway upgrading between Belize City's Buttonwood Boulevard and the PGIA junction. The total project cost is 107.2 million Belize. And going in the opposite direction, there is funding from the UK via CDB for rehabilitation of the Philip Goldson Highway right through to the Northern Border and including the Remate Road."
The PM also mentioned that the Roaring Creek Bridge will be replaced and that the first fifteen miles, between Georgeville and the San Antonio junction, of the new Caracol Road should be finished by year's end.
And one subject that the PM and the Leader of the Opposition did seem to agree on is the decriminalization of small quantities of marijuana:...
Hon. John Briceno, Leader of the Opposition
"To a crippling national cynicism. A total loss of confidence in a system that sees an ordinary Belizean youth locked up for a stick of weed."
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
"On the social progress front, we celebrate now the imminent passage of the marijuana decriminalization Bill. This is a first step in ameliorating conditions that saw principally the already marginalized ending up in jail for weed possession. Weed possession in amounts that were so small as to be minuscule."
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