Camille: Unemployment rate down

Planning and Development Minister Camille Robinson-Regis is insisting that the unemployment rate has gone down since the People’s National Movement came into power in 2015, despite claims by the Opposition that this was not so.

During her presentation of the Finance Bill (2017) on Friday at the Lower House, Tower D, Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain, Robinson-Regis claimed inflation was also at the lowest it had ever been for the past seven years.

She said official figures showed that the number was in the region of just 2,000.

“We have heard them saying that 25,000 were on the breadline, which is totally inaccurate,” Robinson-Regis said. However, Chaguanas East MP Fazal Karim said 25,000 persons were retrenched during the past couple of years.

He said while the Government was claiming that the unemployment rate went down under their tenure, he questioned exactly by how much this figure was. Karim said people were dipping into their savings to make ends meet while being afraid of losing their jobs/

“We have never seen our country plunge into this level of depression,” he said.

Karim said many people wanted to migrate.

“How many jobs did you create in the first two years?” Karim questioned.