 The Caribbean community has created history selecting for the first time a woman to serve as Secretary-General, more from Tucson King English Francis. Dr. Carla Barnett, a national of Belize, has been elected to serve as the new Secretary-General of the Caribbean community from the 15th of August. Her assumption to office will coincide with the end of tenure of Ambassador Irwin LaRocque, who is completing his second tenure in office. Dr. Barnett was elected on May 11th during a special meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of Caricum, chaired by Dr. Hon. Keith Rowley, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Dr. Barnett is the first woman and the first Belizean to be selected for the post. And St. Lucia's Prime Minister, the Hon. Alan Shastney, was among the region's leaders who decided on Dr. Carla Barnett's appointment. Hon. Shastney says he is looking forward to some critical changes at the Secretariat with Dr. Barnett at the helm. The Secretariat that we have now, even its name, needs to be reviewed. Certainly the structure of the Caricum Secretariat has to be restructured. When I looked at the job description just on the Secretary General, it's very vague. And I think that we have to become a little bit more specific and a whole leadership at the Secretariat, a little bit more accountable to what our objectives are. Certainly coming out of COVID, it's very clear that deeper regional integration is necessary. We're spending way too much money on services that we can't afford. So St. Lucia with a population of 180,000, if we were to share in terms of security, let's just use security as an example, I think we should have a regional security force that is more present in our day-to-day lives than currently what we have, which is only on cases of emergency. We can deploy people to go to react to a situation rather than having now a central database of everybody's fingerprinting, whether we have the access to DNA, because it's not to say that criminals are just staying in one place or the other. And we also have to have a greater focus on white color crime as well. Honorable Shasne says integration after COVID-19 will be paramount to the development of the region. Why do we have to have OECS Civilation Authority, Barbados Civilation Authority, Jamaica Civilation Authority, Trinidad Civilation Authority, when one is advice? And even for the airlines doing business in Karakam, it makes much sense that there is a common platform that they're operating on. It just makes it much easier. But COVID has really I think made it absolutely necessary that we have a deeper dive into its integration. And the Karakam Secretary has to play a lead role in that. It can't just be about foreign affairs. I think foreign affairs is important, but I don't think it's the only thing. And certainly for us at OECS, we're now meeting on a more regular basis. We're now getting the central bank to be more integrated into policy and also in harmonization. So we hear many times that we go to the parliament and pass bills that have already been approved by the other OECS countries in the sake of harmonization. And I think this is the same thing that needs to take place at the Karakam. And I'm really hoping that Dr. Barnett, being a person who has worked there before, has left and is now coming back that we're going to start seeing these kind of changes taking place.