On June 18, 1971, at the ceremonial opening of Parliament, the Governor-General, Sir Solomon Hochoy, stated that he had declared the office of Leader of the Opposition vacant. This came about by virtue of the fact that the PNM had won all 36 seats that were contested in the 1971 general election.
The provisions of Section 66(2) the constitution at that time read as follows:
“Whenever there shall be occasion for the appointment of a Leader of the Opposition, the Governor-General shall appoint the member of the House of Representatives who, in his judgment, is the leader in the House of the party which commands the support of the largest number of members of the House in opposition to the Government.”
Based on these provisions, a leader of the opposition could not have been appointed because there was no MP who was “the leader in the House of the party which commands the support of the largest number of members of the House in opposition to the Government.”
The philosophy that drove the creation of these provisions was based on the concept of party politics. However, in July 1972, Roy Richardson, the then MP for Point Fortin and a parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Finance, resigned his portfolio and went into opposition. He was not the leader of a party at that time but he was certainly “in opposition to the Government” and he was appointed Leader of the Opposition. He was soon joined by Horace Charles, the then MP for Siparia, in forming the United Progressive Party and they constituted the opposition before they subsequently became opposed to each other.
By 1976 when the republican constitution was introduced, the provisions regarding the manner of appointment of the Leader of the Opposition were substantially changed to remove the link to leadership of a political party. The current provisions of section 83(2) are:
“The President shall, if the person concerned is willing to be appointed, appoint as Leader of the Opposition the member of the House of Representatives who, in his judgment, is best able to command the support of the greatest number of members of the House of Representatives who do not support the Government.”
The fundamental philosophical shift here was to remove the requirement for leadership of a political party as the basis for being eligible for appointment as leader of the Opposition, secondly, to broaden the discretionary powers of the President over those of the Governor-General in making an appointment by changing the words “largest number” in the previous constitution to “greatest number” in the current constitution, and thirdly, to introduce the concept of willingness to serve.
The initial thinking behind the creation and appointment to the office of Leader of the Opposition in T&T is best captured in the House of Lords on July 19, 1962, in the reply of the Marquess of Lansdowne, Minister of State for Colonial Affairs, to a parliamentary question for written answer filed by Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough. The question was:
“What considerations led to the adoption of the proposal in paragraph 36 of the report of the T&T Independence Conference, 1962 (Cmnd. 1757) relating to the appointment of the Leader of the Opposition, and for information as to the occasions on which the Governor-General will not be required to consult and act on the advice of the Cabinet?”
The response to that part of the question that related to the “appointment of the Leader of the Opposition” read as follows:
“The proposal in paragraph 36, which was put forward by the T&T delegation and accepted by the Conference, follows closely the corresponding provision in the proposed Jamaica Independence Constitution. It is modelled on the appropriate provision in the Ministers of the Crown Act, 1937, except that it is the Governor-General who will be required on all occasions to determine who shall be Leader of the Opposition. In this country the Speaker is required to determine who shall be Leader of the Opposition only in the event of any uncertainty as to which party in opposition has the greatest numerical strength in the House of Commons or as to who is the leader in that House of such a party.”
The genesis of our constitutional provisions for the creation of the office of Leader of the Opposition was based on an alteration of the provisions of the Ministers of the Crown Act 1937 to replace the powers of recognition given to the Speaker of the House of Commons to determine who the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition should be and to relocate those powers in the hands of the Governor-General.
The issue of leadership of a “party” in opposition to the government remained the central consideration.
In 1976, our constitutional framers discarded leadership of the party as a consideration for appointing a leader of the opposition and left the matter to the discretion of the President to determine the appointment on the basis of the personal choices of the individual MPs who do not support the government.