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IMO, they need to stop applying robots.txt retroactively if they want to be considered a valid archive.

Anyways, thanks for uploading Fantasy World Dizzy. Now I can experience the horror the same way that the children of the '80s and '90s did.

"2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association."

So far, so good. But it also has a section, the so-called "limitations clause", that states:

"The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

The Charter does not define what constitutes "reasonable" or "demonstrably justified", so it was left up to the courts to rule on that. The current interpretation is known as the Oakes test, and is actually fairly sensible.

However, the problem remains that this basically gives the government the ability to restrict freedom of speech, if such restriction can be "demonstrably justified". Consequently, for a long time, Canadian law prohibited a fairly broad category of speech labeled as "hate speech", and said prohibition was found by the courts to be consistent with the Charter.

It had also created a special tribunal to deal with the purported violations of one of the laws in question (specifically, Section 13), which operated under principles somewhat different from the regular court system. The article I linked to was about that. You can read the law here:

http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/H-6/section-13-20021...

This particular law was, indeed, repealed by the Harper government. However, it only dealt with Section 13 law. There are other laws in Canada that are still in force that regulate "hate speech"; in particular:

http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-319.htm...

http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-320.htm...

Furthermore there's nothing precluding any future government from enacting a law to restore Section 13 and reinstate the Commission - all it takes is a simple majority in the legislature. Some people have called for the Trudeau government to do just that, although it did not indicate the desire to do that so far.

The other issue is that the Charter can be circumvented by both the federal and the provincial governments by their use of the Notwithstanding Clause, which is as follows:

"(1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15.

(2) An Act or a provision of an Act in respect of which a declaration made under this section is in effect shall have such operation as it would have but for the provision of this Charter referred to in the declaration.

(3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.

(4) Parliament or the legislature of a province may re-enact a declaration made under subsection (1).

(5) Subsection (3) applies in respect of a re-enactment made under subsection (4)."

In other words, the legislature can effectively limit any fundamental freedom (this is Section 2, the one that includes freedom of speech and expression), and the only thing that they need to do so is 1) declare that they're doing it, and 2) renew that declaration every 5 years.

So far, the only instance of the Notwithstanding Clause used to limit freedom of speech that I'm aware of is its use by the legislature of Quebec in the 80s to pass their language protection laws (that mandated use of French in certain public signage etc). However, it could, in theory, also be used for "hate speech" laws and other similar restrictions.

The general point is that, in terms of both actual and potential curtailment of the freedom of speech, Canada offers far fewer guarantees than US does. While the Trump administration has expressed some hostility towards the concept of free speech already, actually acting out on it would put them on the collision course with the Supreme Court and its currently standing Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling interpreting the First Amendment, which provides extremely broad free speech protections, far exceeding anything that Canada has in the Charter, even ignoring the Notwithstanding Clause.

In terms of other countries that have laws and legal checks and balances comparable to those in US, the only one that I happen to know of is Estonia. But I'm sure there are others, it just needs researching. For something like the Internet Archive, which is archiving materials that can be contentious, I would expect legal freedom of speech to be a very strong consideration when picking jurisdictions in which to operate.

French police recently raided the infrastructure of such a place, and now it's gone. It was around for 8 years.