JUSTIFICATION, CONSTITUTIONAL AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
Having read carefully the Act to Amend the Counties and Parishes Act to declare the City Municipality of Portmore the fifteen parish of Jamaica; and connected matters, the following is my considered opinion:
- There is sound and reasonable justification for increasing the number of administrative units into which Jamaica is divided from fourteen to fifteen.
- Portmore capital Portmore best qualifies to become the fifteenth parish.
- The Electoral Commission of Jamaica has done its duty, as set out in The Electoral Commission Interim Act 2006, by advising the Ministry of Local Government and the Parliament concerning boundary violations that will occur if the existing constituency, electoral division, and polling division boundaries that now define the Municipality of Portmore are unchanged in establishing the Parish of Portmore.
- If there is compliance with the Constitution of Jamaica, then the earliest time that Portmore can become a Parish is February 2026. This is because the Constitution of Jamaica is pellucidly specific as to when electoral boundaries must be changed, which is, during a two-to-four-year period of General Review, four years after the last period of General Review. The last General Review ended in February 2022.
- Should the Government decide to use its majority on the Standing Committee of Boundaries of Parliament and its majority in Parliament to ignore the advice of the Electoral Commission, to violate the Constitution with respect to breaches of constituency boundaries, and to hold a General Election which includes the Parish of Portmore, then the following will happen:
a) The Country will immediately be pushed into a major constitutional crisis. What would not be in question would be that a General Election would have been held with identified violations of constituency boundaries by the competent authority with no compelling urgency for so doing. The time for the court to rule on the matter and the remedy if the court rules such action unconstitutional is moot.
b) The Electoral Commission will certainly become a façade when another breach of the Convention is added to the fiasco of making the Electoral Commission the Political Ombudsman. The Electoral Commission may as well be downgraded from being a Commission of the Parliament to a Department of Government.
c) The widely recognized gains made since 1979 by Jamaica as an authentic and stable democracy will be put at grave risk. This is likely to have long-term negative and even dire consequences for Jamaica and Jamaicans at home and abroad.
Professor Emeritus the Hon. Errol Miller
Former Chairman of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica
March 8, 2025
