P.C.C. Ready to Launch Public Outreach Strategy

P.C.C. Chairman Anthony Chanona says that the initial challenge was managing the personalities of twenty-three organizations that form the commission.  A strategic plan was also adopted, as well as an orientation of the different methodologies of constitutionalism. Chairman Anthony Chanona says that a lot of people, ninety-eight percent, do not know the contents of the constitution. And so, the P.C.C. is ready to launch its four-month public outreach strategy. Thereafter, public consultations will take place from October through to February. 

Anthony Chanona

Anthony Chanona, Chair, People’s Constitution Commission

“We have a draft public outreach strategy because unlike Jamaica and Barbados, we have adopted the strategy of going into a public education exercise for four months using the school system, using citizen survey – starting at the base, the people. We’ll be calling for papers from within the organizations. So in a sense, we have taken seven months to assess our base. We now feel that we have gained the institutional comradery to begin to work as a team into the public outreach, given the knowledge that we’ve had over the last seven months. One of the things in the strategy that I am going to employ is constant briefings with the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister to be able to have as minimum political interference into the process and the way to mitigate that is to inform them what we are discussing, but in all other constitutional jurisdictions that have failed, most of the failure was because there was not the political directorate buy-in and we are trying to mitigate that by informing both political parties and the third parties with these updates as we go along. So the strategy is assessing the base by citizen survey – that will be by soft launch using blast media platforms of the telecommunication database and then in September when the schools come back in, then we drive that into the school system and to be able to get at least three hundred and fifty thousand responses on where we are as a nation. Based on that response, then we go into the public consultation, which then begins October to February.”