Samuda faces censure motion in House today
KARL Samuda, the Opposition member of parliament for North Central St Andrew, will today face the heat when parliamentarians debate a censure motion brought against him, after he alleged that a report on the contentious Sandals Whitehouse hotel project, done by Port Authority of Jamaica President Noel Hylton, was submitted to former Prime Minister P J Patterson and the Cabinet.
He also alleged that the government was hiding the report. However, Hylton, along with government officials say no such report was submitted.
Samuda, after failing to withdraw the allegations, had the censure moved against him by government backbencher Donald Buchanan.
“The motion that we have before us is for the House to take appropriate action,” Heather Cooke, clerk for the Houses of Parliament, told the Observer.
Cooke said that a censured member may be expelled or suspended without pay and stripped of parliamentary privileges.
However, it was not clear if government members would be using their strength of numbers to push for such drastic action against Samuda.
The government, which holds 35 of the seats in the 60-seat legislature, in July this year used its majority to defeat a censure motion against Phillip Paulwell, the minister of industry, technology and commerce, who criticised by the opposition for his handling of the cement crisis.
The Opposition Jamaica Labour Party holds 24 seats in the House, while there is one independent.
According to Cooke, although there is no precedent for expulsion in Jamaica, one of the punitive sanctions available is expulsion or suspension of a member.
“But the House could refer the matter to the Committee of Privileges, which has the power to deal with the actions of members and outsiders who breach the privileges of the House,” she said.
Three parliamentarians have been censured, of which one was suspended by the Jamaican parliament in the last 50 years, as government and opposition use censure motions to score political points and embarrass each other.
The censure motion, also called a motion of non-confidence, is a parliamentary tool traditionally put before Parliament in the hope of defeating an opponent.
Political historian Troy Caine, in an interview with the Observer, recalled that Frederick (Slave Boy) L’Overture Barca Evans and Maxwell Carey, late former MPs in Westmoreland Eastern and Western respectively, were each censured twice.
Opposition Leader Bruce Golding also recalled that the late former Prime Minister Michael Manley was censured, when he was leader of the Opposition.
According to Caine, Evans was known to regularly remove the Mace from the House, thereby forcing the adjournment of the proceedings.
“Once the Mace is removed the proceedings have to be adjourned,” he said, adding that “removing the Mace is an offence which can see a member being censured”.
In the meantime, Opposition Leader Bruce Golding said political parties use censure motions to express condemnation against a parliamentary opponent, and that several have come before the Jamaican Parliament in recent years.
“.It is essentially a condemnation of an action or behaviour by a parliamentary opponent,” Golding told the Observer.
“I bet you they will not take the matter (motion against Samuda) any further. Because if they do, then the contents of the report now become public and they know what is in that report. But my instruction to Derrick (Smith), Leader of Opposition Business in the House, is that every time the House meets he is to rise and ask about the motion,” Golding said.
He said, too, that Buchanan’s motion did not call for sanction against Samuda, and that he believed the motion is already dead. Golding added that there was no punishment for such an action, unless the member has seriously offended Parliament.
Meanwhile, retired clerk of the Houses of Parliament Edley Deans said a censure motion could also be carried against an entire government, Deans said, however, that there was often a confusion between a censure motion and what is termed a breach of privilege.
“The censure motion per se is usually aimed at a government, while the breach of privilege is when a member uses his or her parliamentary privilege to say something bad about people, because as you know they are protected by Parliament,” he said.
He said if someone breached his/her privileges the member can be named by the speaker, who will then put a motion calling for the suspension of the member from the sitting.
One such motion, he recalled, was brought against the late People’s National Party (PNP) minister Anthony Spauldings while in Opposition, following the 1980 general election defeat.
Spauldings, who was accused of using unparliamentary language in the House, was cited by the speaker for gross and disorderly conduct, disregarding the authority of the chair, and abusing the rules of the House.