This was discussed in the case of R v. J.J. This is an issue that has occupied a lot of time in court.
When it comes to communications, what we're primarily looking at here are electronic communications that are slowing down court proceedings. For example, in a human trafficking investigation, a Crown could theoretically receive from the police of jurisdiction thousands of text messages between a complainant and an accused person. Before those thousands of messages can be disclosed to the accused, assuming they're going to be used to prove the case, it not only has to go through the Crown vetting procedure, with them exercising their duties to protect a victim through properly vetting disclosure, but it also has to go through the entire production regime.
This has been one sticking point in particular, especially in human trafficking cases but in sexual assault and related cases as well, which get more and more complex when we have large volumes of communications. Communications have been singled out as something we can clearly save time on. We can allow the Crown to exercise its responsibilities as a minister of justice to properly fulfill its disclosure obligations to protect the victim and to get those records to the accused that are going to be used at trial, in any event, because the Crown will lead them. It will give them the time to do that, and we don't necessarily then have to wait all the way until we have a trial judge to make a decision on production, and then, at that point, the defence would understandably be upset that the trial is very close and they now suddenly have thousands of communications. We're primarily talking about electronic communications.