Thank you. I can take that.
By “big picture”, in a sense we also mean what's going on in the context of everything. When you hold a hearing and you're asking those questions, you'll have two types of witnesses. One will often be the Auditor General, and one will be the audited department.
You would want to ask the Auditor General for clarity on the audit and the audit's scope. An auditor won't speak to something outside of the scope of the audit, because the nature of the information they're giving you is very much evidence-based, and they would only have evidence on that scope. Then, in terms of the big picture for the audited entity, what you really want to look at is whether they are implementing changes to address the issues that were identified in the audit, and whether that is going to improve public administration. That's what we really meant by ”big picture” on that slide.
There are a lot of ways of going about questioning, and we do an entire workshop on questioning, so I won't get into the details on that, other than to reiterate that it's very helpful as a committee if you go into a hearing knowing the types of questions you want to ask. What aspects of the changes and improvements do you want to understand more about? Are there holes that weren't addressed in the status updates or progress reports that you have received from the department? Those reports are intended to let you know and to outline what they plan to do.
Another key issue on effective questioning is keeping an ear open for whether they are contradicting anything in that action plan or status update. Get more details on that if you need them, and then you can take that information and use it for the report you're writing.