I've been thinking about dipping my toes back into the blogging waters for a while now. I've been putting it off for school and work with this fine organization but with this week being a big one for electoral reform news, I feel the need to add my thoughts to the discussion.

The past few days have been exciting ones for electoral reformers in Canada. First, this past weekend was the first weekend of the deliberation phase of the historic Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform. I'm hoping to get the chance to put on my academic hat sometime over the next few days and listen to most of the video of their discussions, which are available online at TVO's great site on the OCA.

The big news out of the weekend is that on Sunday Assembly members took a straw poll on their favoured voting system - and over 80% of them chose a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system! Democratic Space has the lowdown here and as always the incomparable Idealistic Pragmatist is all over the story as well.

This is positive news and reflects the fact a significant majority of presenters to the OCA proposed some form of MMP.

It will be interesting to see the rest of the OCA deliberations and how things may change. A paper (PDF) by noted Canadian electoral experts Blais, (the BC CA research director) and Fournier concluded that the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly became more sympathetic to the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system (which was their ultimate choice) as their deliberations progessed.

Will the same dynamics come to play in Ontario?

Also, on Monday in the House, NDP MP Catherine Bell introduced a motion related to electoral reform (see her site here). I see some problems with the motion (which I'll save for another post), but it's nice to see this crucial issue come before the federal parliament.

Haven't got the chance to read it yet, but for the keeners out there (the first day of debate is here).