Date: Monday, 31 March 2025
Candidates
- Julie Hunter (CINP)
- McKeeva Bush* (IND)
*incumbent
The forum
The 13th of 19 candidate forums, hosted by the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce, was a solo affair on Monday. West Bay West incumbent McKeeva Bush did not attend the forum, “due to unforeseen circumstances”, leaving challenger Julie Hunter alone on the stage.
Hunter, running for election for the first time on the Cayman Islands National Party ticket, did not let Bush’s absence go unnoted.
“The incumbent has concentrated on his own self preservation and legal battles and has not been able to fight for his constituency. Tonight, once again, he’s not here to represent his people. Our people are sleeping on the streets, in cars, on the beach, while we continue to import labour for their jobs,” she said in her opening remarks.
“For far too long, we have allowed the qualities of decency, honesty, integrity and trust to be erased from this high office, and I think that it’s high time that we put those qualities back into the office.”
Hunter, a cousin of Bush, offers 40 years of experience in the banking and legal sectors, having retired last year from Cayman National Bank. She is also the founder of the non-profit organisation Circle of Love.
Bush told the Compass he did not attend the forum because he had constituency matters to attend to. Bush said his wife has been sick and he has been running a lower-profile campaign directly in his constituency.
Bush also said the chamber forums, which give two minutes to each candidate to answer each question, didn’t offer sufficient scope for the discussion of ideas.
Key issues
Hunter outlined the cost of living, education reform and immigration reform as her top three campaign issues. Immigration was a topic she returned to throughout the forum, highlighting the impact of immigration policy on issues like living costs, the labour market, housing and community trust.
“I’m running for the many Caymanians who emigrated to other countries because they didn’t have opportunities in their own homeland. They need an advocate,” she said.
“[There are] 37,000 work permits in order for the government to fund NAU. … This is absolutely unacceptable. This is lost dignity, lost opportunity and a lost future for many of our people.”
Hunter called to “urgently put a pause” on status grants and permanent residency, as well as a two-year moratorium on certain classes of work permits.
“We have a lot of unscrupulous practices in immigration that need to be rooted out, unscrupulous employers. We have many people on work permit that shouldn’t be here,” she said, later urging for greater employment of Caymanians in sectors such as tourism and policing.
“I think that we need to get back to providing financial incentives to attract local police officers. This would bring back the days of community policing, and that would [bridge] the trust gap,” she said, urging a reduction in hiring of officers from overseas, “as they do not relate to the Caymanian culture”.
On the topic of immigration, she also called to reinstate the Caymanian Protection Law and for government hiring to be subject to the same rules as the private sector, in order to avoid loopholes and an “easy pathway” to citizenship.
Education
Regarding education, Hunter first called for a focus on early childhood education with an emphasis on training teachers to work in this area.
“Many of our preschools do not have trained teachers. They have assistants. This is simply not good enough. That’s why we’re failing at the early level,” she said.
She also encouraged an expansion of technical and vocational training, starting as early as Year 6, to place Caymanian students on a more certain pathway to employment.
“It’s my understanding that CIFEC [Cayman Islands Further Education Centre] was meant to be a TVET school. I don’t understand why that hasn’t happened. So many of our young people are coming out without any kind of certification at all,” she said.
She suggested replacing level one diplomas with TVET certification and encouraged apprenticeships with Caymanian entrepreneurs to promote professional development. Hunter also said establishment of a national workforce development plan could help Caymanians better prepare for existing jobs.
For the enrichment and support of older residents, she said West Bay would benefit from a senior centre as a source of social support and housing.
“They’re the people that built this island. At this stage of their life, they should be able to relax. They should be taken care of,” she said, adding that too often Cayman’s seniors must choose between medication or eating a meal.
She also threw her support behind free healthcare for both seniors and children.
Housing and development
To support Caymanian home buyers, Hunter said there needs to be a reintroduction of the “guaranteed mortgage scheme” with commercial banks and a focus on affordable housing. She said a fixed-rate government bond could also enable local banks to better offer fixed-term mortgages that wouldn’t be influenced by fluctuations in the US market.
She encouraged an easier home-building process as well for Caymanians.
“There’s a lot of red tape, building control regulations, so young people get frustrated, and … the approval process is very, very expensive, and I think that government could do something to streamline that and help our Caymanians with this matter,” she said.
“Also, we need to make sure that we look for unconventional methods of housing, like building multi-storey complexes, which would house many, many families, instead of just always thinking that each person has to have a piece of land.”
She also called to remove the property requirement from the permanent residency process, which encourages foreign residents to invest in local real estate, and discouraged the practice of “land banking” by non-residents.
Regarding development on Seven Mile Beach, she said it was time to address the issue of beach erosion and coastal setbacks.
“Seven Mile Beach is our pristine – was our pristine – beach, is something that we treasured, and now we’re starting to lose a lot of it,” she said.
She suggested eliminating seawalls along the shoreline and establishing a public-private partnership to tackle the issue of erosion.
“I don’t think that this should just be a government project. I mean, they’re all benefiting from it, and I think that we need to work hard on getting the sand replenished. This has severely impacted our environment and our tourism product, and whatever we can do to get that replaced, we need to do,” she said.
She added that enforcement of environmental impact assessments should be mandated for all future developments.
Standout moments
Hunter urged Caymanians to vote based on character, judgement and integrity, and to reject career politicians interested in “personal gain”. She said West Bay West had become the “forgotten district” under the current leadership.
“Our current MP for West Bay West writes about his strong, stable leadership. However, I beg to differ. The last 12 years have been anything but stable for him. This election is not about who has the loudest bully pulpit or who has occupied the chair the longest,” Hunter said.
“Let’s break the cycle of patriarchy, the rule of the father, and do not be fooled by idle threats that your seamen’s benefits will be taken away if he is not re-elected.”
She called for greater accountability across government and supported the chamber’s suggestion of establishing a government accountability scorecard.
“We need to mandate time-sensitive performance audits and key performance indicators across all ministries, and publicise when those reports are due so that the public will know,” she said.
“We need to also make sure that we digitise and streamline our government processes so that we can reduce delays, red tape, and we can also cut costs.”
She called out the use of “slush funds” used for personal benefit and lack of transparency in government spending, identifying such spending practices as the reason why “so many times, we are running out of money”.
The next forum will be held on Tuesday, 1 April at 7:15pm with West Bay South candidates André Ebanks and Sterling Dwayne Ebanks.
Watch debate online
James Whittaker contributed to this story.