Neil Armstrong, Gleaner Writer
GOLDING
TORONTO, Canada:
THE JAMAICA Labour Party (JLP) is ready for the next general election and will be launching its campaign later this month. "We have selected all our candidates. We recently did an assessment in terms of the state of readiness in each constituency, generally speaking, they are all ready."
Speaking with The Gleaner in Toronto, Canada, the JLP leader and Leader of the Opposition, Bruce Golding, says the voters' list is almost settled. He says there are some omissions that the party identified and brought to the attention of the Electoral Office and he hopes that the corrections will be made urgently. He speculates that the election could be held between the end of August and early October but ultimately, the date of an election is determined by what the Prime Minister considers to be in the best interest of her own party winning those elections.
PARTY UNITY
"I spent a lot of time last year really trying to get the party united. We have been through a difficult leadership transition which had its own share of tension and I regarded my first task as getting the party reunited." He says he had to make sure that persons who had not supported him felt comfortable and secure, and at the same time he had to make sure that those who supported him didn't feel as if they now had a duty to virtually take over the party. "We are perhaps more united than we've been for many, many years."
The JLP leader says in a sense he sympathises with the difficulty that Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller is having because whereas disunity was always something that was associated with the Labour Party, people are now looking critically at the PNP because there are clear obvious signs of wounds that have emerged from the leadership contest which have not been healed. He says the carry-over from that was seen in a lot of the constituency challenges that were mounted where persons known to be supporters of Peter Phillips were being challenged by supporters of the Prime Minister.
"Therefore, one of the challenges that they have now is how to ensure that when the elections are called, that they can go into those elections with the kind of unity that is indispensable if they are to ensure that their machinery can function and if they are to maximise their own chances at the polls."
APPEAL
Mr. Golding says Mrs. Simpson Miller has done what few politicians have been able to do - extend her own appeal across a pretty wide spectrum - and that represented a serious challenge to the JLP. However, he noted that a lot of the euphoria around the Prime Minister has dissipated, largely because she has failed so far to define her prime ministership. "People will have difficulty in sort of identifying a particular focus and a particular emphasis that her stewardship has been programmed on. What we get from the ground now when going around and meeting with people, even persons whose spirits may have been lifted by her emergence as Prime Minister, are in a sense coming into an anti-climax where they are saying 'I thought things would have been different' but as they put it, 'nutten still nah gwaan."
CEMENT CRISIS
He says the Prime Minister has not been assertive on a number of issues: $41.5 million over-expenditure on the Sandals-Whitehouse project, the Portmore toll issue and the cement crisis. He thinks that Philip Paulwell should have been dismissed from Cabinet for sheer incompetence and negligence but the minister has been endorsed by the Prime Minister. He posits that this is perhaps because Mr. Paulwell was one of the few Members of Parliament that supported her campaign. "I think people are getting a sense that the Government is sort of drifting, that the Government isn't making things happen, things are happening to the Government. So that, a lot of the excitement about her has begun to dissipate."
The Opposition Leader shared his vision for Jamaica at an event on Saturday in Toronto, organised by Friends of Jamaica, an organisation that supports the Jamaica Labour Party.
