Dennis Minott | Sunlight now is cheaper than scandal later

The arrival of 117 Canadian electrical linesmen to assist the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) in restoring power after Hurricane Melissa has been greeted with official smiles, airport photo-ops, and an oddly incurious media tone. We are told to be grateful. We are encouraged to see this as competence arriving from abroad to rescue a battered grid.

But Jamaicans should resist the sedative of optics. Because beneath this seemingly benign intervention lies a far more serious policy question — one that touches public finance, procurement opacity, labour exclusion, and the quiet mechanisms by which disaster response becomes a gateway for value leakage and policy capture.

Let us begin by clearing away a convenient straw man. This is not an argument against foreign assistance. CARICOM governments — Barbados, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad, and others — have provided post-Melissa support on a government-to-government solidarity basis, including technical personnel. That is how regional disaster cooperation is meant to function. There is no quarrel whatsoever with Jamaica utilising skills from wherever they are genuinely, transparently, and competitively available.

The Canadian case is different. Materially different.

These linesmen are not here under Canadian government disaster assistance. They are not part of a CARICOM solidarity framework. They are present under a Government of Jamaica–JPSCo arrangement involving for-profit firms, at material cost to Jamaica, occurring contemporaneously with a US$150 million publicly backed loan to the JPS. That distinction matters — and pretending otherwise insults public intelligence.

The real question, therefore, is not where the workers are from. It is who brokered this arrangement, under what terms, and whether those terms were shaped — directly or indirectly — by loan conditions, contractor preferences, insurance covenants, emergency-procurement clauses, or pre-existing commercial relationships that have not been disclosed to Parliament or the public.

Timing is not incidental here. Six weeks after a Category 5 hurricane devastated parts of western Jamaica, the sudden mobilisation of an expensive foreign workforce coincides neatly with the authorisation of a massive, urgent loan. In any country with a strong record of procurement transparency, that coincidence would still merit explanation. In Jamaica — with its long, well-documented vulnerabilities in disaster spending, emergency contracting, and infrastructure governance, it demands scrutiny.

Globally, disaster economics teaches a sobering lesson: emergencies weaken oversight. From post-Katrina New Orleans to post-earthquake Haiti, rushed procurement, opaque contracts, and “trusted” vendors have repeatedly proven fertile ground for cost inflation, contract steering, and public value loss — often without a single bribe ever changing hands. This is not speculation. It is pattern recognition grounded in decades of governance and corruption research.

Against that background, the conspicuous absence of CARICOM labour — particularly Haitian skilled workers — becomes impossible to ignore.

Haiti sits next door. Its labour force has been forged, painfully, through years of post-earthquake and post-storm reconstruction. Haitian electricians, linesmen, masons, and builders are internationally recognised for their resilience, adaptability, and competence in precisely the conditions Jamaica now faces. Across the Caribbean and North America, Haitian tradespeople work routinely under French-English-Creole supervision structures. Language barriers, often raised lazily in local debate, are neither rare nor exotic obstacles in engineering and disaster-response contexts.

Yet no public evidence has been offered that Haitian or other regional linesmen were even considered. No comparative cost-benefit analysis has been disclosed. No explanation has been provided as to why CARICOM labour frameworks, including CSME provisions, appear to have been bypassed entirely.

In the absence of such disclosure, assertions about “feasibility” are not arguments. They are excuses.

This brings us back to the US$150 million loan itself. Serious questions have already been raised — questions that deserve answers irrespective of the labour issue: why a 20 per cent public shareholder is carrying this exposure; how the remaining US$200 million of the JPS’s financing plan will be raised; whether Government will be pushed into further lending; whether private-capital projections are credible; and whether ratepayers will ultimately bear the cost.

What must now be understood is that labour sourcing, procurement choices, and debt structure are not separable issues. They form a single economic ecosystem. Loan conditions can shape contractor selection. Contractor-mobilisation agreements can dictate labour origin. Insurance and risk-management instruments can quietly privilege pre-approved foreign firms. None of this requires illegality. All of it requires sunlight.

That is the heart of the concern.

If the terms of the US$150 million loan — or the emergency-procurement architecture surrounding it — effectively obligated the JPS to engage specific foreign contractors, thereby excluding local and CARICOM labour before any transparent comparison could occur, then Jamaica has a problem far larger than grid repairs. It has a governance failure hiding behind hurricane recovery.

And if Haitian skilled labour was never even part of the conversation — never evaluated, never priced, never fairly weighed — then we are entitled to ask whose interests this reconstruction model truly serves.

This is not a moral argument dressed up as economics. It is an economic argument with moral consequences. Public money leaving Jamaica to pay premium foreign inputs, while regional labour sits idle or excluded, weakens recovery, drains foreign exchange and corrodes public trust. Worse, it teaches citizens that “emergency” is once again the alibi under which accountability quietly evaporates.

No allegation of wrongdoing is being made here. None is necessary. The demand is simpler and more urgent: early transparency before silence hardens into scandal.

Parliament, civil society, and the media should insist on full disclosure of the loan’s contractual terms, detailed breakdowns of labour-sourcing clauses, documentation of whether regional labour was considered or excluded, and clear records of how contractors were selected and mobilised. Independent oversight should not be an afterthought but a condition.

Because when disasters strike, infrastructure can be rebuilt. Trust, once lost, is far harder to restore.

And if Jamaicans allow borrowed money, opaque contracts, and imported labour to pass without question — wrapped in the flag of hurricane recovery — then the real damage from Melissa will not be measured in downed power lines but in another quiet erosion of democratic accountability.

Sunlight now is cheaper than scandal later.

Dennis A. Minott, PhD, is a physicist, green energy consultant, and long-time college counsellor. He is the CEO of A-QuEST. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.