by staff writer
ROSEAU, Dominica, Jan 9, CMC – Opposition Leader Lennox Linton Wednesday confirmed that an opposition legislator, Dr. Thompson Fontaine, was no longer a parliamentarian after Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit announced on Tuesday night that he had missed three consecutive meetings of the legislative chamber.
“Mr. Thomson Fontaine, as we speak, is no longer a senator in Dominica because he missed three consecutive sittings without the expressed authority of the Speaker,” Skerrit told television viewers.
Linton, speaking on a private radio station here, acknowledged that Fontaine, an economist who is reported to be employed as the Senior Economic and International Policy Adviser on the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission, overseeing implementation of Agreement on Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan, had written to the Speaker Alix Boyd-Knights about his unavailability to attend Parliament.
“Thompson Fontaine is under pressure because the Speaker will not accept his notification or his word to the Speaker that he can’t attend parliament. She decides what she wants and since is sole judge of that under the rules of the parliament…so she decides what she accepts and what she doesn’t accept.
“But Thompson had already decided that it would be better for him to move on and he was going to resign the Senate position anyway, “said Linton who had named him as a senator following the 2014 general elections.
He said the decision by the economist “had nothing to do with leadership or this sort” and that Prime Minister Skerrit “is trying to make a deal about it” even as he, Skerrit has not informed the nation about the position regarding a parliamentary secretary Ivor Stephenson, who was appointed in April last year and is yet to make an appearance in Parliament.
“When you put the Thompson Fontaine situation side by side with what has happened with Ivor Stephenson and how he as prime minister has managed it…with an elected member incapable of going to Parliament …and he is happy that through the machinations of the Speaker they have declared the Thompson Fontaine seat in the Senate vacant”.
Skerrit had told television viewers that Linton had shown poor leadership by allowing Fontaine to miss the three consecutive sitting of the parliament “to the point where the Speaker would write to the President informing the President that a senator has missed three sittings and therefore, he has vacated his seat in the “Parliament.
“I can tell the country that this would never happen to me as prime minister with an elected member of parliament, far more, for a senator,” he added.
