The bill, which has four clauses, stipulates that natural gas is to be measured in British thermal units, or BTUs. And that’s it. Most people would find it hard to think of anything whatsoever to say on the matter, far less anything entertaining, topical or provocative.
So as a precaution, Dr Moonilal began by making out that the bill had something to do with larger issues of trade, economic growth, and people’s issues such as value, fairness and economic discrimination. But as it turned out, he didn’t have to fall back on any of these topics.
Instead he commented on the ’obscene’ national flag at the Hasely Crawford Stadium, which he said should be flown permanently at half-mast as a symbol of waste and corruption.
The debate had some connection with issues of competence and efficiency: three people had lost their lives on the Bailey bridge at Macoya because the Minister of Works couldn’t build a new bridge there.
He got in a mention of the new ’dancehall’ at the Prime Minister’s house, and the fact that guests at the diplomatic centre would guzzle whisky and wolf down strimps (which he subsequently amended to the less evocative ’shrimps’).
’Nobody’s weighing them,’ he remarked, wondering if the strimps were measured in BTUs.
Still on the topic of metrology, he noted that a T&TEC meter reader had been shot earlier in the week. He called for a formal inquiry into the cost overruns at Petrotrin. He reflected on the need for more informative labelling on food and drink, in lettering that was large enough to read, because children were drinking too much sweet drink and sugary juice.
Aware that he was pushing his luck, he asserted, ’I want to assure Minister Thirty-six One that I won’t torture you further’-a reference to the habit of the Leader of the House to trying to shut up Opposition speakers on the ground of irrelevance. Indeed, it was a measure of Dr Moonilal’s virtuosity that he had nimbly skipped from one topic to the next before Mr Imbert could make a single attempt to stop him.
And Dr Moonilal wasn’t done yet. He flitted over the quality of H1N1 vaccines, since when it came to health, standards were a matter of life and death. He called on the Government to consider distributing industrial disinfectant to all schools to sanitise them against the virus.
Moving swiftly on, he reprimanded the Minister of Health for reportedly firing doctors in south Trinidad without proper cause; and wound up with the mischievous claim that he was always grateful for the opportunity to speak on the issue of metrology.
The contrast between Dr Moonilal and the next Opposition speaker, Dr Tim Gopeesingh, could not have been more marked or more unfortunate. Dr Gopeesingh seems to be regarded by the UNC as one of its frontline speakers-but why? He has the unfortunate habit of either veering off the rails (as in the case of his infamous ’ethnic cleansing’ claims) or else making heavy weather of the simplest and most humdrum subjects.
On Friday he took the latter course. He stuck doggedly, painfully to the subject of measurements, which he found baffling in a remarkable number of ways. Sometimes things were measured in millions or trillions of cubic feet, so why choose BTUs instead? Some units of measurement were related to heat or energy, while natural gas could also be measured by volume. Compressed natural gas was measured in gasoline gallon equivalents.
The Canadians spoke about gigajoules.What was the relationship between BTUs and a joule? Then there were newtons; it was a real conundrum. Liquid fuels were shipped in barrels.
’Which one are we really going to refer to?’ he asked, apparently not rhetorically.
’BTUs,’ the PNM pointed out helpfully, no doubt hoping to end the matter there.
’The population is confused,’ Dr Gopeesingh alleged.
’No, you’re confused,’ they replied.
Alaska used cubic feet, Russia used cubic metres, Canada measured in therms for domestic consumers; Dr Gopeesingh rambled on.
In the end it was Dr Gopeesingh who, though he clung grimly to the topic, was interrupted by Mr Imbert. He explained with studied patience that the Metrology Bill answered these questions: standard cubic feet and BTUs were to be used.
It didn’t work: Dr Gopeesingh wanted further mysteries solved. How do you measure how much gas flows through a pipeline?
’We’ve been measuring that for 50 years,’ said an astonished Mr Imbert.
And so it went on. Summing up, Trade and Industry Minister Mariano Browne described the Opposition contributions as circumlocution and obfuscation respectively. And if by circumlocution he meant that Dr Moonilal ran rings round everyone, he was quite correct.
