St. Lucia News Online
Prime Minister Allen Chastanet addressed the nation on Sunday night ahead of general elections on Monday, asserting that the choice facing the electorate is whether to go backward or forward, as he described the vote as the most important since independence.
“You cannot afford to stay home,” he declared, adding that voters would be signing a contract for this country’s future.
Chastanet pointed to his administration’s achievements in office in areas including health care, the economy, the creation of jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, spending on education, measures to facilitate the backlog of cases in the justice system and investment to assist the work of the police whom he said had been left with ‘crumbling stations’ by the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) government.
“Under the United Workers Party, the US government now has confidence in our government again,” Chastanet explained.
He said Saint Lucia is headed in the right direction despite the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s still a lot more work to do.
But he observed that ‘the other party’ wants to make the election campaign about ‘two guys’ who left the UWP.
“They want to make it about the lies they have told you over the past few years. But the future of Saint Lucia is too important for four men to be fighting to be prime minister. We don’t know what the deal has been struck, but we all know who is behind it,” Chastanet said, without going into detail.
He told voters that the general elections is about their future, not that of the men to whom he referred.
“The future of your children, the future of your family,” Chastanet observed.
“Our vision in the United Workers Party is not just to tell you that we care about you, not to tell you that we love you – not just empty words, but action, because action speaks louder than words, actions that deliver a better future for you,” he noted.
“When we saw people losing their jobs, we put together a plan quickly to get them back to work – 3,000 plus jobs during a global pandemic. That’s not just talk, that’s demonstrating real care and now we’re delivering the greatest recovery, the fastest recovery, the strongest recovery in the entire Caribbean,” Chastanet asserted.
As a result, he declared that now is not the time to put that recovery at risk.