FREEPORT ﾖ If Andre Cartwright has his way, by the time the deadline comes in 2005 for The Bahamas to make a decision as to whether or not it will become a signatory to the negotiated agreement for the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA), every resident of Grand Bahama who demonstrates an interest in understanding what the agreement is all about will know everything there is to know about this historic proposal.
Mr. Cartwright, a chartered accountant with the Grand Bahama Port Authority, is the Grand Bahama representative on the Bahamas Trade Commission announced recently by Prime Minister Perry Christie, and he has established as a top priority involving as many residents of Grand Bahama as possible in the debate on the pros and cons of the FTAA.
He hopes to accomplish this with the assistance of a recently formed advisory committee, and he plans to get the ball rolling with a one-day seminar on January 28, 2003, followed by a series of town meetings throughout the island.
In urging all Grand Bahamians to participate in the coming seminar and town meetings when they are announced, Mr. Cartwright said that the Prime Minister “wants feedback from as many Bahamians as possible.”
The seminar will be conducted by attorney Reginald Lobosky, who Mr. Cartwright said has “a wealth of knowledge about the proposals contained in the drafts of the FTAA.”
So too does Mr. Cartwright, who speaks passionately about the implications of the FTAA for The Bahamas and the fact that The Bahamas will have to totally revise its system of taxation if it signs the agreement.
“The biggest concern and the part that I am working on is the fact that this provision in the proposed agreement says that all customs duty must be eliminated because the perception is that customs duty is used as a barrier to trade,” Mr. Cartwright said, during a recent interview. “Our position in The Bahamas is that we are not a producer nation. We donﾴt use customs duty by and large as barriers to trade. We us customs duty as the primary source of revenue for the government.”
If by signing this agreement, he said, The Bahamas is going to be required under that agreement to abandon customs duty, we as a nation need to find alternative ways to put $600 million a year into the Treasury, and we have to determine what that mechanism is going to be. Could it be a value-added tax or some sort of a services tax? Could it be income tax?
Suggesting that income tax would probably be a more just form of taxation, Mr. Cartwright said the way in which customs duties are currently imposed, it means that “a person making $100 a week and a person who is earning $1000 a week are in effect paying the same amount of taxes, and proportionately the person who is earning $100 a week is paying a very high level of taxation compared to a person who is a lot better off financially.”
He noted, however, that although income tax may be a more equitable form of taxation for The Bahamas, he did not think that “any government, any political leader, any single person can take it upon themselves to say that we are going to move from a long-standing method, to which everyone is accustomed to a ?method that?s totally foreign to us.”
“No party can do it,” he stressed. “It will have to be put to a national referendum. The people of The Bahamas will have to say, “Yes, we will support this.”
He also noted that there is a lot of political and other social impact in saying you are going to go from a situation of an indirect method of taxation via customs duties to a direct method of taxation and that setting up the infrastructure to collect income tax is going to be a major challenge.
Asked what would happen if The Bahamas did not go along with the FTAA agreement, Mr. Cartwright said, “We donﾴt have to sign it, but I think there are going to be consequences. No one has said what these consequences are going to be, but as an individual, I have a hard time believing that America is going to permit countries to stay outside that agreement and benefit from it. America has an eight-trillion-dollar economy, and if that economy says this is what we want, well you better believe that is where we are going to go.”
He underscored this assertion by noting that The Bahamasﾴ economy is closely tied to Americaﾴs, and if America insists that we must sign this agreement, it will be impossible for us to go against it.
But he suggested that what we need to do as a people is “be very clever and say to the Americans, Here is our situation. Here are the things we are concerned about. If we sign on, then you have got to protect us from these kinds of things.”
On the other hand, he noted, The Bahamas has “some good things to bring to the table, in that amongst our peers in the Caribbean and the other nations here in the Americas, we have a thriving democracy here, and a big portion of the FTAA is the section on civil society that deals with democracies, the separation of church and state, separation of different arms of government, keeping government out of your judiciary, and so on and so forth.”
“All that is established for us,” Mr. Cartwright said. “The institutions of our society function well, and we could say that we are already in compliance with that in large part. The one part that I think we have a difficulty with is the issue of discrimination. As you may recall, a year ago we had a referendum in this country, and I think the primary driver for that referendum was the fact that there is this huge provision which says that we canﾴt have discrimination based on gender.
“And as you very well know, there is a portion of our Constitution that actually implies discrimination based on gender. We are going to have to address that because for us to be a part of this, we are going to have to show a timetable when we are going to move towards those requirements.”
By Oswald T. Brown, The Bahama Journal
