THE Senate spent hours debating a version of the Environmental Protection Levy (EPL) Bill last Friday before a major procedural error was uncovered during the lunch break, forcing the chamber to close the proceedings, withdraw the improperly certified Bill, and restart the legislative process with a corrected version.

The Bill was eventually passed without further amendments, but not before senators had to retrace the required procedural steps after discovering that the version before them did not carry the certification identifying it as a money Bill.

The discovery came after Government Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon returned from the break and informed legislators that the version circulated in the Senate was not the one that had been properly certified.

She later clarified that there was no substantive difference between the two documents.

“Every bit of the document, the Bill, is the same, it’s just that the certificate at the beginning of the Bill is not there that certifies it as a money Bill,” she said.

The certification is significant because the Constitution requires a speaker’s certificate to be endorsed on a money Bill when it is sent from the House of Representatives to the Senate. Money Bills include legislation dealing with taxation and other specified matters involving public finances.

The procedural problem meant senators could not simply discard the defective copy and continue from where they had left off.

Opposition Senator Floyd Morris initially suggested that the debate be suspended while the correction be made, pointing out that members had been in the middle of their consideration of the Bill when the error was discovered.

Tavares-Finson agreed with the intervention but subsequently clarified that the debate first had to be brought to an end before the defective Bill could be withdrawn.

Morris, meanwhile, used the episode to criticise the handling of legislation that reaches the Senate without members having sufficient time to examine it.

“I just want to say how unfortunate it is that we are at this point because this is a serious and egregious error in terms of the Bill being tabled without the necessary or appropriate certification to indicate that it is a money Bill because that is the gravamen of the problem,” said Morris.

He had also argued that members should be given adequate time to examine Bills before being required to debate them.

Morris Dixon then moved to close the debate in the Senate’s public business, allowing the improperly certified version to be withdrawn and the corrected Bill to be tabled.

When the corrected version was before the chamber, she made it clear that the Government did not intend to make senators repeat the lengthy substantive debate that had already taken place.

The Bill then proceeded through the necessary remaining stages and was passed without further amendments.

The procedural mishap came against the backdrop of wider concerns about the speed at which the levy legislation was being taken through Parliament.

The Senate mishap came just days after Opposition Leader Mark Golding had warned in the House of Representatives that Parliament should not be placed in a position in which legislation is rushed through because the Government had left itself too little time to put the necessary legal machinery in place.

Golding, speaking last Tuesday as Finance Minister Fayval Williams tabled the Bill, said he understood the Government’s desire to have the measure enacted by the end of September but questioned why Members of Parliament were being asked to consider and pass tax legislation on the same day it was introduced.

Under Jamaica’s parliamentary system, a Bill must pass through the required stages in both Houses before it can become law, and legislation does not become an Act until it receives the formal assent of the governor general. Money Bills originate in the House of Representatives and are subject to special constitutional provisions governing their treatment in the Senate.