House Meetings are About to Go Virtual

John Briceño

Adjusting to the inconveniences brought about by the pandemic means that House meetings will be held virtually very soon. This morning, The Prime Minister tabled a motion in the House of Representatives for meetings to be held via Zoom or another virtual platform. It’s the direction that board meetings have been forced to take in the wake of the pandemic and Cabinet recently decided to adopt that platform for the foreseeable future. The decision comes despite the retrofitting of the Assembly Building.

Prime Minister John Briceño

“This motion has the recommendation of the Cabinet.  Madam Speaker, just please allow me a few words just to explain what we‘re attempting to do here.  On the first part of the amendment, as you rightly pointed out because of COVID, it is very difficult to be able to have house meetings here in the House because we‘re in a small, cramped quarters and many people ask, well why don‘t you just meet virtually on Teams or whatever it is that you want to use.  We had to explain to them that the standing orders never envisioned for a day that you can hold House meetings virtually.  This is a thing that‘s not new to Belize, it‘s being done in other countries, especially like in the Caribbean and so basically we‘re not inventing the wheel, we are just moving with the times and give you, Madam Speaker, and your staff, the proper tools to decide how best we can hold House meetings and also with the Senate safely and to protect each and every one of us instead of having all these Plexiglas around us and keeping our masks and doing everything possible to try to protect one another.”