Senator Jonathan Wehner Asks if the PM Also Threatened the Finance Minister with Deportation for "Not Following the Lead of Parliament"

Senator Jonathan Wehner conducted a year-by-year examination of the financing of a critical crime-fighting division of government on the Senate floor on Monday, using the government's own budget estimates to argue that the forensic division central to securing gun convictions has consistently been given a fraction of the money Parliament approved for it, and, for several years, none of its capital allocation at all.

"If I want to see what a government actually is prioritizing, I don't listen to what they say on radio, or they say in parliament, or they say when I pass them on the street," the opposition senator told the chamber during the debate on the Firearms (Amendment) Bill 2026. "I go to their budgets to see where the money is going, because that is where you see what is the priority of someone. You follow the money."

The Numbers

Citing the Antigua and Barbuda Forensic Services (ABFS), code 5517 in the national estimates, Senator Wehner said recurrent expenditure between 2022 and 2024 came in at only "about 31 to 42%" of what Parliament approved each year, while capital expenditure, the money that would establish a permanent laboratory and its equipment, was "close to zero."

The figures he read into the record:

• 2022, the division's first year: budgeted $1,565,313; actual spending about $64,000. "Remember, this is when it was established. You need to set up, you need to get a building, get lab, get everything. They actually spent $64,000 when they budgeted [over] 1 million."

• 2023: budgeted $2,003,236. "They spent $524,000. This can be a government so concerned about fighting crime?"

• 2024: budgeted $1,783,312; spent $617,000. "So, you see clearly, never does this actual [expenditure] rise to even 45% of what was budgeted."

• Capital Expenditure 2022–2024: approximately EC$2,313,000 approved; only EC$50,000 spent. "You budget $2.3 million and you spend $50,000 to establish an entire division that is responsible for doing ballistics testing, DNA testing — so critical in crime fighting."

• Capital Expenditure 2023 and 2024: 2023 budgeted $300,000 and spent nothing. 2024 budgeted $1,225,500 and spent nothing. "You budget 1.5 million and you spend zero. Zero — in years of surplus, in years of an economic powerhouse."

Minister of Finance Following the "Lead of Parliament"?

Senator Wehner reserved his sharpest barb for the Member for St. John's City West, Prime Minister and Finance Minister Gaston Browne, who has attacked judicial officers for allegedly failing to follow Parliament's sentencing intent and threatened to have them declared persona non grata.

"You have a member of the lower house for St. John City West who goes on the radio, who goes on the state media and says there are members of the judiciary who are not following the lead of parliament, and if they don't follow and step in line and give proper sentencing, he will deport them and declare them persona non grata," Senator Wehner said. "So, what are you doing, member for City West, minister of finance, when the parliament approves an appropriation bill that says government is going to spend $2,003,236, and they go and spend $500,000? Is that following the lead of parliament, the money that was approved in the budget?"

His summary of the pattern was withering: "We all know nothing is ever enough. You can always do more. But the point I'm making here is that when you do nothing, that can't be enough. Nothing is ever enough, but [doing] nothing can never be acceptable."

Support with a Demand Attached

As with his opposition colleagues, Senator Wehner's criticism came wrapped around support for several of the provisions in the bill itself. "I don't have a serious issue with increasing sentences for heinous crimes. Nobody has an issue with that," he said in closing. "But that alone is not the savior of this country. We need to properly resource and invest in crime-fighting measures."

The government, he said, must "resource and finance the law enforcement entities — the ONDCP, the police force, the ABFS — not just buying stage for carnival time or doing things because we have people coming here for CHOGM."

The forensic division's own budget submissions, he added, complain "in every single budget cycle that what they have now is inadequate." Until that changes, the senator argued, the 15 and 30-year sentences senators spent Monday debating will remain contingent on a question the budget has already answered: "If you don't catch them on camera committing the crime, how are you going to find them?... How are you going to catch them, to impose these sentences?"