NOW that Carnival 2012 is officially over and a comparatively sober mood prevails with the start of the Lenten season, perhaps time will be taken to tackle important unresolved national issues such as:

• The conflicts involving the Integrity Commission, President Maxwell Richards and Commission's chairman and deputy chairman;

• Those highly controversial police raids, first on the editorial offices of CCN-TV6 and later on Newsday, both of which cry out for serious official explanations while all options for appropriate action remain open to both media enterprises.

While Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar was enjoying her commendable Carnival participation, playing sailor mas with Panorama champions Neal and Massy Trinidad All Stars, readers of yesterday's Express would have learnt of the official admission that the Caribbean Community is in the grip of a "crisis" that requires urgent collective action by the Heads of Government of the 15-member regional movement.

As advised by the team of management experts who made a critical assessment of Caricom's future, the prevailing "crisis is sufficiently severe to put its very existence in question…". And unless fundamental changes occur, the regional economic integration movement "could expire slowly over the next few years as stakeholders begin to vote with their feet…"

At least one Caricom leader, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, thought it important to express where he stands, even before he joins his fellow leaders next month in Suriname for their first half-yearly inter-sessional meeting which will have the crisis scenario high on its agenda.

In a letter to the Community's Secretary General Edwin La Rocque, who assumed that post late last year after the retirement of the long-serving Edwin Carrington, Prime Minister Gonsalves was quite blunt in his own assessment on strategic directions for Caricom.

Referring to the Community's "promise and fulfillment", the Vincentian leader, who has had some four decades of active involvement in varying aspects of fostering regionalism, noted:

"Caricom has achieved much but its extraordinary promise is yet to be fulfilled. Its greatest accomplishment thus far has been to keep alive in an institutional form, however ramshackle, the sensibility of "Caribbeanness" and the dream of the optimally possible political expression of our enduring Caribbean civilisation…

"Still," he added, "Caricom's current mode of marking time at an historical moment of overwhelmingly awesome challenges for our region which compelling demands a more profound integration,is mistaken…"

Hardly a flattering assessment of an integration movement 38 years in existence. "Minimalism in integration," he warned, has its attractions but in our regional context, it can be fatal to our people's well-being.

As Gonsalves sees it, the decision to place the Caricom Single Market and Economy "on pause" is but "a euphemism for standing still which, in a dynamic world, is sliding backwards. That to me is the evidence before us in Caricom since its leaders, including me, decided at a special conclave in Guyana about a year ago to put the single economy process on 'pause'.."

In summarising the state of "participation" among Caricom's 14 independent member countries (Montserrat remains in a British colony), Prime Minister Gonsalves reckoned that The Bahamas and Haiti are engaged only in economic/trade arrangements; Belize and Suriname have historically been on the margins until recently when they moved to "centre stage".

"Further, for the past four years (2007-2011) Jamaica has been preoccupied with its own internal challenges and a restricted engagement in Caricom. Conceptually and practically, it was less weighty in regional affairs than hitherto…"

So far as Trinidad and Tobago is concerned, Gonsalves holds the view that "in most recent times it does not evince a practical enthusiasm for a deeper Caricom union and has all but abandoned leadership responsibilities in 'Project Caricom'"….

Against that assessment, Gonsalves was to later point to what he understands to be Caricom's "central failure" which he summarised as being focused on "integrating state unions and trading arrangements, and not (my emphasis) on the people themselves…"

He acknowledged that state institutions and trading arrangements do touch and concern people, but made a distinction with, for example, a "people-centred matter" like freedom of movement, including "hassle-free travel which, he stressed, "remains substantially elusive", with citizens most affected being from Jamaica, Guyana, St Lucia, Grenada, Dominica and St Vincent and the Grenadines."

He has urged in his letter to the Caricom Secretary General that "together the leaders of Caricom must make our union more perfect because it is a great cause for our people's enduring benefit…"