Belinda and PR

Well, everyone has their comments about Belinda's decision to call it a career in politics. Truly a sad state to lose someone of her, uh, intellect. She will be missed dearly (mostly by the blogging community, and at conventions for those who like free booze). Although honestly, if she was going to quit, shouldn't she have had the decency to do so before Martha got nominated somewhere else? I'm sure we'd all have a bit more respect for Belinda if she stepped down and paved the way for Hall-Findlay.

For something else, Greg from DemocraticSpace has another post up on Proportional Representation which will be a secondary focus in the next election. Currently the debate is whether to have it regional or provincial representation (ie. your PR vote would go towards a provincial tally to divvy up candidates or a regional list), and whether it be open-list or closed list (you pick which regional rep you want vs voting for the party and having them run down their list). For all Ontario voters, I'd definitely recommend a stop by there now to get familiar with the topic. I confess to not knowing too much about the different systems, but 15 minutes browsing down his posts gives a great refresher on some basics of it.

And that brings up another matter of its federal implications. In the past, we've seen some talk by a few different parties about some forms of PR, most notably the old reformers (part of their populist appeals) and the NDP more recently (since they want more seats). Obviously now that they're in power, the Conservatives won't be too thrilled with it, but it would be interesting to see if they lose the support of the Bloc, would the NDP say they'd support the Cons with an increased support of some MMPR?