In picking a program and studying it in some detail, and it could be a relatively widely skilled program.... The example I just happen to be personally familiar with is a program that seemed to have about nine lives in Canadian governance, called the court challenges program. It kept getting dispatched and then brought back, and so forth.
I had the experience of working for one of the committees that worked on it. What was interesting to me was that it was a very small program. You could actually have all the people who worked in the program come in as witnesses. So the members had a chance to become familiar, in considerable detail, with just who these people were, what they did, how they worked, etc. There seemed to be a lot of interest generated by the fact that we were looking at something small enough that you could actually get your head around it. There is perhaps some merit in finding a program that would be small enough to do that with.
The only offsetting consideration is that it has to be interesting. I had another experience, with the predecessor to this committee. They decided, as part of the 2003 exercise of their report on the estimates process, that they wanted to try looking at a program in detail. They picked the real property program at Public Works. They had officials come in on successive weeks. The members struggled to attend those meetings before long, because they were just boring. There just didn't seem to be anything that interesting there.
It's a real challenge to pick a program, going back again to this motivation issue I talked about. It has to have some political resonance. Otherwise, it's not going to interest you folks, and it's not going to be visible to voters. It's a challenge.