Much to my regret, I feel ethically and politically obligated to publicly show my disagreement with the decision adopted last Thursday by the Government Council of the Canary Islands, when approving the method of designating a single member, representing the three Chambers of Commerce in the province of Las Palmas, on the Board of Directors of the Port Authority. The agreement gives off centralism and a lack of sensitivity, hence my disagreement.
According to the official note released by the autonomous government, this single member will represent the three Chambers of Commerce existing in Gran Canaria, Lanzarote —and La Graciosa— and Fuerteventura, will follow a rotating shift and the duration of the mandate is calculated according to the percentage of companies with relevance in the port and navigation sector of said islands. The final calculation establishes a duration of the mandate of 41 months for the Gran Canaria Chamber, and only seven months for the Lanzarote and Graciosa Chamber.
For decades in the Canary Islands we have recognized the unavoidable need to introduce correction factors in the representation of the non-capital islands, precisely to prevent under-representation from becoming an obstacle to development. These factors, such as the island status, were incorporated to try to eradicate the harmful consequences of provincial centralism, giving rise, for example, to the triple parity mechanism for the distribution of seats between islands and provinces in the regional Parliament.
Incomprehensibly, the Government Council has ignored the reforming tradition of recent decades and has opted for the pure and hard proportionality of 'you have as much, you are worth as much', unworthy of a progressive Executive. Following this reasoning and assigning the regional deputies according to the population criterion in the strict sense, Lanzarote would correspond to four, at most, instead of the eight it possesses. This agreement ignores the island status, something that is inadmissible.
If the Port Authority is of provincial scope and the province has three islands —obviating La Graciosa, since it lacks that administrative consideration—, the reasonable thing is that the representativeness criterion would be carried out taking into account that differentiated fact in addition to the number of companies, instead of the number of companies registered in each one exclusively. It should be noted that this problem does not occur in the other province, since there is a Chamber of Commerce for the four islands there.
It lacks coherence that, when claiming in Madrid and in Europe, the main argument we use is the differential island fact, that of the fragmented territory, that of the specific singularity of each island, and that then we ignore it here, in the Canary Islands, and by ourselves, knowing that our needs are not the same as those of other sister islands. I do not find the criterion used fair and, in addition, it sets a precedent that we believed was overcome and that could be used in other cases. This is not how community is made, damage is done unnecessarily and the path back to the capital's centralism that has caused so much damage to the so-called minor islands is resumed. Not like this.
Fco. Manuel Fajardo Palarea, PSOE senator for Lanzarote and La Graciosa.