Let me back into a response by speaking from a very narrow Alberta perspective, but I think it goes to what you're saying.
There are two facts of life about politics in Alberta. One is that we have a tremendous concentration of power because there is no check to the majority government of the day. And we've had a majority government of the day since 1971, the same party, so there's no check on that. I worry then, in an analogous situation, about the House of Commons. It's hard to remember back to majority governments, but this may happen again. Our political system doesn't create very effective checks on majority governments. We have the courts, we have provincial governments, and I don't rule that out. But within Parliament those checks are not very great.
But to me, the more compelling reason that comes out of the Alberta experience is that we have electoral systems at the federal level and at the provincial level that fail in any way to capture the diversity of the population. We have a single party, federally and provincially, with different parties winning an overwhelming majority of the seats, even though the population is much more diverse--in a partisan sense, in an urban-rural sense, or whatever it is. The electoral system we have for the House of Commons tends to exaggerate the homogeneity. It projects a single Alberta personality onto the political stage, whereas the province is much more complex.
One of the reasons I support Senate reform is that if we can get it right, we can have an electoral system that reflects, through its elected representatives in the Senate, the diversity of the province. If we have an electoral system for the Senate that produces, say, ten Senators, and ten of them are always Conservatives, then we've simply replicated the representational flaws that exist within the House of Commons.
That's why I keep going back in my own mind to saying we have to get the electoral system right, or we'll dig ourselves into a hole on this.