And, from court news to national affairs.
Tonight, we have a number of topics to tell you about. Those include the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister's reactions to the official visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, their take on the protest actions launched by the Indian Creek villagers, Toledo, the investiture ceremony that the Duke and Duchess participated in to honor outstanding Belizeans, and a major cattle sweep that happened in Shipyard, Orange Walk.
We start our newscast tonight, however, with our sparring match with Prime Minister John Briceno on the chronic gas pain that Belizeans are experiencing due to the soaring pump prices of fuel. Last week, the Prime Minister told the press that his government would be meeting with the Social Partners to discuss mitigation measures. So, we asked about those discussions and a few of the ideas that the partners floated to the PM and his team. Here's what he had to say:
Hon. John Briceno - Prime Minister
"Probably in the next few shipments that will come, we'll see the price going up. But, as you know, last week, we had a consultation with our social partners, which also included the bus association, the churches, the private sector, our NGO community, to listen to them. And I must tell you that I was very pleased with the discussions that we had. Everybody understood that it is not something that the government is raising the taxes. It is that the price worldwide continues to go up. We do believe that it is stabilizing, but remember, once it stabilizes, it takes time to get to Belize. So, probably, the next new shipments may - might go up, and after that, it starts to gradually down. The idea that we had - one of the ideas that they were asking for, from BTIA, they're saying, we want predictability. We want the government to then set the price. So, we are looking - we got their recommendations, and now next week, we're going to present to Cabinet a paper as to how we're going to stabilize. The idea is to stabilize the price, whereby we're thinking about setting up a fuel stabilization fund so that whenever the price goes up, we take from the stabilization fund to be able to keep the price, and whenever the price goes down, we continue to keep the price at the same level, until we can pay it off. So, it's different ideas that we're having that we believe can assist us in going through this very difficult time. In our first year, we managed to stabilize the economy. The economy is starting to grow, but now, we have to address these other issues that are affecting our citizens every single day."
