We can learn lessons about democracy from the TCI shake-up

News reports about the new Constitution being drafted for the Turks & Caicos Islands (TCI) are instructive for Bermuda about the content of and the process toward democracy.

One can see areas in which TCI’s autonomy will be less than ours, for example in the proposed relationship between the local government and the governor.

At the same time, the concept and, one hopes, the details of “good governance” will be an essential ingredient of the TCI government’s decisions.

The process is enviable. Consultation in the broadest sense of the word seems to be a core element prior to cementing the final document and putting it into force. And the consultation appears based on an intention to have the TCI public make informed decisions.

Here in Bermuda we have had two stabs at consultation. One was for the Sustainable Development Plan.  The process for devising the plan was good but implementation has had not much more than lip service.

Consultation on the PATI legislation only went halfway. One can surmise there was a genuine desire on the part of those who worked on the PATI legislation to engage the public in full consultation. That would have required that the public’s submissions regarding PATI would have been treated as public information and disclosed openly.

The government would then have engaged a second round, pointed to the ideas from submissions it had accepted, and why, and pointed also to those it did not accept, again with reasons. A second round of submissions and disclosures would have done the process justice.

As with consultation, there’s a difference between bandying the word ‘democracy’ around and operating in the spirit of democracy: one tries to pretend arrival, the other recognises that the journey continues.

There’s also a difference between what has been achieved and what is the ideal.

There are some who promote, and many who believe, that democracy is an absolute. Each government administration tends to applaud its own version of democracy and to quietly ignore or even suppress moves toward greater democratisation that might adversely affect its political fortunes.

Expansion of the franchise around factors of age, gender and race, and restrictions around factors of citizenship, property and privilege were all campaigned for or resisted under the banner of democracy — expanding it or protecting it.

I don’t automatically expect that a government, some of whose leaders are only just learning to pronounce “transparency”, would have got it all right on the first try. What I do expect is an admission that there’s a ways to go yet, and a willingness to keep educating and moving the public in an ongoing collaboration toward democracy’s ideals.

There are several areas where progress remains to be made. They include:

• Expanding the franchise for the selection of the island’s leader —
• the overall leader of the Island should reflect and feel beholden to the interests of the entire island, not just the majority party;
• Fixed term elections — to remove the incumbent party’s unfair advantage of being able to get a head start on general election
• preparations;
• Absentee balloting — to enable all eligible voters to participate;
• Recall — to enable a voting district to remove an unworthy MP;
• Proportional representation of some sort — so that the make-up of the elected body is proportionately related to the number of votes cast.
• An elected Senate — but with its members elected on an island-wide basis.

The redesign of the Turks and Caicos Islands’ (TCI) Constitution could well see that territory forging ahead of Bermuda in the march toward that moving target we call democracy. Making sustained moves on the list above could make us indeed “progressive”.