Santa Cruz de Tenerife 25 Feb. (Europa Press) –
The president of the Canary Islands Government, Fernando Clavijo, emphasised on Tuesday the “achievement” of the Canary Islands Development Fund (Fedecan) after a decade since its initiation in the previous legislature, and has expressed willingness to reassess the original criteria.
In this context, he addressed the control session of the Autonomous Parliament in response to a query from David Toledo, the deputy of the Canarian nationalist parliamentary group, who sought an evaluation of the Canary Islands Development Fund.
This occurred after Toledo made his inquiry, amid rising opposition criticism that the topics discussed in this control session appeared to be “lifted from a comedy club,” as he accused them of leaving a “gap of over 500 million euros in healthcare matters” and being the ones who “blocked the creation of an investigative commission to clarify political responsibilities.”
Following this, Clavijo, who reiterated the Canarian approach to governance, reflected on how the Fedecan debate “was highly significant at the time,” appreciating that the presidents of the councils and mayors of the municipalities “stepped away from political opportunism” to advocate “a model for implementing” policy in the Canary Islands “that considered not only the territory and the population,” but also the “dual reality and double insularity.”
He stated that “no one can dispute its success,” although he acknowledged that after 10 years “the Canary Islands have undergone numerous changes” and happily “is growing four times higher than the Eurozone average, outpacing the national average of Spain, and salaries are rising more than the Spanish average, while per capita income is increasing more than the average across Spain.”
Furthermore, he clarified that all economic “achievements” have arisen from “collaborative efforts,” indicating the “necessity” to possibly reassess “the criteria of Fedecan.”
A decade ago, he noted, the decision was made to allocate 75 percent of infrastructure funds, 20 percent towards employment, and 5 percent for research in public universities.
However, he suggested that in evaluating what has been a “successful” initiative, a decade on, it may be beneficial to “review these criteria” and even “extend it to socio-health infrastructures, for instance, or others” that can be adopted collectively.
