Personally, I don't know of any case law that would help us distinguish the terminology used here. It's more a matter of semantics.
It must be understood that the purpose of these amendments is to enable the Attorney General of Canada, under the provisions of Bill C-2, to transmit or give power to the Director of Criminal Prosecutions to undertake criminal prosecutions under federal jurisdiction. At the same time, the Attorney General of Canada remains responsible for those prosecutions.
So there are two entities that have the same power. There's the Director of Criminal Prosecutions, who uses it every day in the vast majority of cases, and the Attorney General, who uses it sometimes, if he wishes, to give written instructions or as an intervener himself. These interventions or written instructions must be published in the Canada Gazette. So there are two interests.
The purpose of the clause is to ensure complete communication between the two entities that have the same powers, to avoid situations of conflict in prosecutions, if, for example, the Attorney General is not informed of a specific problem that he would deem to be of public interest, while the Director of Criminal Prosecutions would maintain the perception that it is not a problem of public interest. We want to avoid situations in which prosecutions would be stopped or conducted when the Attorney General would have liked to be informed in order to intervene publicly and to publish that intervention in the Canada Gazette.
Examples may be numerous or scarce. My experience as a prosecutor leads me to believe that the prosecutor doesn't always—and this isn't a criticism—have a political sensibility in certain cases. The Attorney General would like to be informed so as to be able to tell the House of Commons and the public what has happened. The idea is thus to ensure this communication between the two entities.