KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

De­bate on the Na­tion­al Em­blems (Amend­ment) Bill 2025 end­ed in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day evening with the bill be­ing passed.

Af­ter be­ing passed in the Low­er House last week, the bill sought to rat­i­fy the ad­di­tion of the steel­pan on the Coat of Arms while re­mov­ing Christo­pher Colum­bus’s three ships.

While the pub­lic has been crit­i­cal of jew­eller Gillian Bish­op’s re-de­sign of the Coat of Arms, there were mixed views from sen­a­tors.

Lead­ing the charge in sup­port of the re-de­sign, Min­is­ter of Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts Ran­dall Mitchell said it’s all about artis­tic ex­pres­sion.

Be­fore the de­bate, he told Guardian Me­dia, “It’s a de­sign. There is noth­ing that di­vides opin­ion like art and artis­tic ex­pres­sion. I’m see­ing a lot of peo­ple who are in favour of it. In fact, the ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple are in favour of it. Whether they like the de­sign, some peo­ple think it should be sil­ver. Some peo­ple feel it should be a dif­fer­ent type of pan. Some peo­ple feel there should be more than one pan. It’s artis­tic ex­pres­sion.”

Asked how much it cost tax­pay­ers, he said he did not know since the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter was re­spon­si­ble for the change.

In­side the Sen­ate, Mitchell said it would not cost hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars to re­place the em­blem on of­fi­cial doc­u­ments.

He al­so said cit­i­zens will not need to rush to get their pass­ports and oth­er le­gal doc­u­ments changed.

“There will be a cost to change phys­i­cal sig­nage, stick­ers on ve­hi­cles. There would be a cost to is­sue the phys­i­cal re­pro­duc­tions of the Coat of Arms, etc. But the idea that you would have to im­me­di­ate­ly change out the en­tire mon­ey sup­ply to the tune of hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars is sim­ply false. There will be no un­due heavy fi­nan­cial bur­den to the tax­pay­er once the tran­si­tion is prop­er­ly man­aged and once these mea­sures are ac­cept­ed and passed.”

Be­fore the de­bate, Guardian Me­dia spoke to 13 sen­a­tors out­side the Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day. Sev­er­al in­de­pen­dent and op­po­si­tion sen­a­tors were in sup­port of the new look.

Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Anil Roberts said, “The one sub­ject I was not good at in school is Art, so I leave that for those who have skills in art and de­sign and so on. I think that the steel­pan is long over­due for re­spect and be­ing on the Coat of Arms is a good thing. How­ev­er, it’s quite su­per­fi­cial ... while the Coat of Arms may look ab­solute­ly beau­ti­ful, what about in­vest­ment in pan?”

Oth­er op­po­si­tion sen­a­tors like Wade Mark, Dami­an Ly­der and Jayan­ti Lutch­me­di­al-Ram­di­al ex­pressed some sup­port to­ward the pan be­ing placed on the Coat of Arms, though they al­so had strong views about Gov­ern­ment’s sup­port of the pan fra­ter­ni­ty dur­ing the de­bate.

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor An­tho­ny Vieira, SC said, “I am in favour of it. I think it’s a sym­bol of uni­ty and in­no­va­tion of our peo­ple.”

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Ger­ard Hutchin­son said, “I sup­port the con­cept. I think the idea is worth­while. I think, though, there may be oth­er means by which we could im­prove our con­cept of na­tion­al iden­ti­ty. I am not a de­sign ex­pert. It seemed ok.”

Mean­while, In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Paul Richards said, “Yes, I am sat­is­fied. Every­one will have a sub­jec­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tion ar­tis­ti­cal­ly. Every­body will think it should have been sil­ver, it should have been gold, it should have been pink, it should have been blue. But, to me what I saw was a prop­er in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the steel­pan and that’s what’s im­por­tant.”

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor De­oroop Teemal said, “The de­sign is in­tend­ed to cap­ture the na­tion­al in­stru­ment, which it has done. It has more or less re­tained the oth­er as­pects. Why make some­thing com­pli­cat­ed when it could be sim­ple and send the in­tend­ed mes­sage.”

How­ev­er, oth­ers were not quite im­pressed.

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Shar­da Patasar said she was, “A bit un­der­whelmed” with the new look.

Her col­league on the In­de­pen­dent bench Suni­ty Ma­haraj said she be­lieves the artis­tic com­mu­ni­ty should have been more in­volved.

Ma­haraj said, “This is some­thing that re­al­ly re­quired wide­spread con­sul­ta­tion and in­put, and I would have liked to know that the artis­tic com­mu­ni­ty, the peo­ple who’ve in­vest­ed, who are in­vest­ed in im­agery were a crit­i­cal part of it.”