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Shyne Barrow, Leader of the Opposition
"This issue of GST. it took them four years to come up with this? Right before the general elections are supposed to be called? So he said he came up with it in two weeks, so for four years he didn't know that Belizeans need relief? For four years we were dealing with COVID then we were dealign with inflation for the last three years and then now right before election, they give this carrot which is not real because if you look at the price gouging crisis that we have been having where even if they made certain provisions for women's necessities to not be taxed or to have certain tax exemptions and you'd go, I have constituents that complain that they go to the market and the prices don't change. Sugar, which is a controlled price, they sell for more than the controlled price so to say that the GST will do anything when some of these supermarkets don't even report the proper GST and can build in the price to include what would've been GST and all the government gets to do is saying, oh we're waiving GST, but they have proven very incompetent and in effective when it comes to enforcement, so how will we know? The Deputy Prime Minister said to the media a week or two ago that he was outraged at these shopkeepers and that the way they were behaving was criminal and unethical. He's the government, they're the government and he's complaining about it so that means they have not found the competence to do anything about it so the point I'm making is so how can we trust that anything will change now for Christmas, it will be even worse, and who will tell us whether the prices were complied with or not? Because we have not had that type of accountability for the last few years."