Over 90 new laws or amendments on agenda

| 22/11/2017 | 30 Comments

(CNS): Government has listed in the budget documents more than ninety pieces of new or amended legislation that it hopes to tackle over the next two years. But there is no sign of the much-needed legal practitioners legislation or the promised district councils law. Government had indicated it was going back to the drawing board on the lawyers law after the controversies over the last attempt to pass the legislation but it has not made it to the current list. And despite the premier’s promises on the campaign trail to amend the district councils law and allocate funding to all 19 constituencies, that commitment appears to be a casualty of the election result.

Even just a few months ago, during a public meeting in his constituency of Red Bay in September, Premier Alden McLaughlin said the issue of district councils was “high on the agenda” for next year. But answering questions in Finance Committee last week, Attorney General Samuel Bulgin said he had had no indication from the government that it would be addressing the issue of district councils during the next two years.

Bulgin, the government’s legal adviser, also said that government plans to take another look at the Legal Practitioners Bill to come up with a “sensible compromise that is workable”. However, the law has not made the list that the administration wants to deal with in the next two years, despite previous claims by the government that the law was needed ahead of the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force review that Cayman will go through next month (see Cayman gears up for CFATF review).

The list of legislation and regulations that government is planning to tackle is both diverse and long, despite comments from the opposition member for East End, Arden McLean, that we have “laws coming out of our ears in this country”.

From anti-bullying legislation aimed at schools to the Penal Code (Reform) Bill to remove obsolete offences and generally modernise the law, government has set out an ambitious legislative agenda. A number of laws are also planned in the health sector, with government aiming to form a committee to review the regulations to support the Human Tissue Donation and Transplant Law that was passed in 2013 but has not yet been implemented.

The government has also listed plans to revisit and review legislation to support a mandatory cancer register, as the current voluntary system is not producing the information needed. While ministry officials and the Health Services Authority are very keen to introduce some form of compulsory data collection in order to better understand the extent of the disease and its impact on Cayman, when Health Minister Dwayne Seymour appeared before the committee, he made it clear that he was opposed to mandatory registration, raising questions about the current government policy on the issue.

Deputy Governor Franz Manderson has also confirmed that another law on the list which is awaiting regulations, the Standards in Public Life Law, will soon be implemented. During Finance Committee hearings this month the premier described the legislation as easy to pass but one of the hardest to put into practice because of its impact on volunteer government board directors and what was perceived as intrusive reporting requirements.

See the full list of proposed laws and regulations on pages 26-31, part 9 in the Plan and Estimates for the 2018/2019 Budget in the CNS Library

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Category: Government Finance, Politics

Comments (30)

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  1. JTB says:

    Can anyone hazard a guess why the Consumer Protection Bill doesn’t contain anything that would outlaw price-fixing?

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  2. Anonymous says:

    What good is any law that is not enforced? Everyone knows that here the Pirate code is the real law.

    • Diogenes says:

      Can’t say that even the pirates had more honor and decency than most of our government officials

      Diogenes

  3. Anonymous says:

    New law stop letting people in cayman on work permits from extremely poor countries so they can come here send all their money home n commit endless crime

    And then frank hall developments builds a low income community for caymanians but all u can find in these developments are expats

    Destroy our schools our roads

    And our way of life

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  4. Anonymous says:

    How about amending the Law which allows the Immigration Department to steal from the public, under the guise of a “Repatriation Fee”!!

    Actually, I have another suggestion for our MLA’s: forget making new laws, you can be kept very busy for the next few years going through our statutes and purging archaic laws and amending those which are poorly written, with loopholes – that’s most of them.

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  5. Anonymous says:

    CNS: Do we know when the house is scheduled to resume in 2018?

    CNS: No, the date has not yet been set.

  6. Anonymous says:

    Yet not one single one of them will ever be enforced anyway.

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  7. Sonny says:

    How about protection from timeshare sales. They let you know how valuable your contract is yet if you try and just give it back after paying for it they tell you it’s worthless and they don’t want it. The only value the contract has is the maintenance fee that the real owner gets every year for 99 years.

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    • Anonymous says:

      We also need a law that forces timeshare properties to register our interest in their property, that we have bought and paid for, with the registrar of lands. This way we at least have a document that has a value attached to it that we can use as collateral at the banks.

      Such a law would also benefit the Government of the Cayman Islands as the company will have to pay stamp duty on the sale. As it is now, hundreds of millions of dollars of beach front property is exchanging hands without having to pay a single dime in land transfer taxes.

      The amount of money extracted from a single condo when it is sold by the week as a timeshare is many times the value they would receive if the condo is sold outright and stamp duty paid and the new owner registered as the owner.

  8. Anonymous says:

    They need to amend the immigration law concerning persons of independent means living in Cayman for years, has no permanent residence or status, owns and lives in multi- million dollars home and refusing to apply for either because they don’t want to spend the money. So they live here as long as they can then before going abroad, stay for a few months then return and start the charade all over again. Also selling produce from their property without a trade license. Sad thing is they are very wealthy .

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  9. Anonymous says:

    This is stupid. Health city is getting a 5 story apartment house with 59 1-3 bedroom units in it for $17 million. How is it possible to come up with a $177 million price to put up a few additional court rooms with offices, meeting space and file rooms?

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    • Diogenes says:

      Health City isn’t in the overcrowded and very expensive Centre of GT not to mention the logistics of all the equipment and material into town.

      Diogenes

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    • Anonymous says:

      Build with friends, top up lodge coffers, party contributions, you know how it goes.

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    • Anonymous says:

      Cheap labour disguised as a second chance.

  10. Anonymous says:

    How do they know there are 90 bills? Most of them cant count above 10. Did they hire one of the big 4 to tell them?

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  11. Anonymous says:

    The Standards in Public Life Law is the barrier between the Wild West and some semblance of honest well-meaning behavior. If gov’t appointed members of public boards are unwilling to sign on, then they should be fired (and quietly investigated by ACC). It’s pretty simple really.

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  12. Anonymous says:

    There are not laws coming out of our ears just catching up with the rest of the world. Nothing about giving tenants better security and deposits going into escrow …private landlords are the real wild west.

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  13. Anonymous says:

    Cayman, the land of Laws with no enforcement. Here is an idea, for 6 months do not pass any new laws and focus on enforcing the Law on the books and see what happens. As a 25 year resident I am constantly amazed at how the local population completely ignores the Law, knowing that the odds are slim that they will be caught or prosecuted.

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    • Diogenes says:

      MLAs don’t really do much in the realm of enforcement that would be the CO and the heads of the various departments, they set policy but they aren’t really the “boots on the ground type”. The most influence on enforcement would be the Police Commissioner who if I am not mistaken reports directly to the Governor and no one else. He keeps the Government informed of his actions and plans but he is relatively autonomous from the MLAs

      Diogenes

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      • Anonymous says:

        Diogenes you are sadly mistaken if you think MLAs don’t get involved in the running of Government departments.

        You make it that someone has a job in a Government Department who does not toe the Party line and you will see how quickly the MLAs will have them on the streets.

    • Anonymous says:

      Big organizations too

    • Chris Johnson says:

      You are dead right. There is no enforcement. I have complained to both the CPA and the TB licensing boards on breaches of the law. Do I get a response? No.

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  14. Anonymous says:

    I quote:

    “Defamation Bill – To deal with the emerging issues involving the application of defamation law principles and the anonymous delivery of opinions which can cause reputational damage”

    gone are the days of anonymous comments on CNS…

    CIG: “Freedom of speech? I think not!”

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    • Anonymous says:

      For example daring to say corruption is endemic in Cayman in an editorial?

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    • Diogenes says:

      We sit there and let them arrest artists, now they know they can get away with it, it won’t stop here. With the egos and the hubris in the LA it won’t be long before we are mandated by law to refer to them as “The Right Honourable Elected Lords and Ladies of the Legislative Assembly of the Cayman Islands”

      Doesn’t help that the obscenity laws are so loose that you could be arrested for just about anything.

      This is what Cayman deserves, it ought to wake people up, when you need a lawyer present to decide whether or not you are allowed to talk about politics

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  15. Anonymous says:

    Terrifying. The regulation of the legal market proposals were crazy enough before the current batch of mediocrity was voted into the MLA.

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