Highlights the importance of taking into account the differences between micro, small and large producers; notes the need to develop suitable conditions and tools for ‘prosumers’ (active energy consumers, such as households, both owners and tenants, institutions and small businesses that engage in renewable energy production either on their own or collectively through cooperatives, other social enterprises or aggregations) to contribute to energy transition and facilitate their integration into the energy market; recommends reducing to an absolute minimum the administrative barriers to new self-generation capacity, in particular by rem ...[+++]oving market and grid access restrictions; suggests shortening and simplifying authorisation procedures by moving to a simple notification requirement; suggests that the revision of the renewable energy directive could include specific provisions to remove barriers and promote community/cooperative energy schemes via ‘one-stop shops’ dealing with project permits and providing financial and technical expertise; encourages the Member States to make use of de minimis exemptions under the European Energy and Environment State Aid Guidelines, so that small and medium-sized projects continue to benefit from dynamic feed in tariffs, exempting them from complex auctioning processes.

PIAC suggests, however, that given the challenges of big data collection by social networking and other online businesses, this committee go further and consider a full enforcement framework such as that for the do-not-call list for companies flouting Canadian privacy law. I'm going to close with some forward-thinking ideas on social networking and privacy.

However, the larger issue for you at this committee is how to help design laws to avoid this type of conflict from arising in the first place, particularly in the fast-moving social networking and online space.

As we analyze the issues related to online privacy, we should note that threats to the privacy of information shared by Canadians are found not solely on what are commonly thought of as conventional social networking sites.

Building trust in the online environment is key to economic and social development.

This will require multidisciplinary research on new technologies and large-scale innovation related in particular to digital privacy, interoperability, personalised electronic identification, open data, dynamic user interfaces, lifelong learning and e-learning platforms, distributed learning systems, citizen-centric public service configuration and integration and innovation driven by users, including in social sciences and the humanities.