Care to expand on this? The wiki page describes some legislation that has since been repealed and I can't even deduce what the legislation exactly said from that article.
The brief story is that Canada does not have free speech guarantees to the same extent that US, for example, does. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says:
"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:
This particular law was, indeed, repealed by the Harper government.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:
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.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'd actually forgotten about the notwithstanding clause entirely.
Still though, Canada's legislation seems no more restrictive than most other (Non-U.S.) democracies. That's according to my quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country (so take it for what it's worth). I mean, surely there are some that are marginally better but it doesn't seem like there are any obvious leaders here. Maybe I'm missing something though.
Given that, I don't see how Canada would be a bad choice for a mirror. Especially given the other distinct advantages. Physical proximity being an obvious one (it's probably much more cost effective to build some servers pre-loaded with data and drive them up versus almost any other option). Same time zone, same language, and general political/social/economic stability are probably also pretty key. And then there are other threat considerations (eg. the Baltics being so close to Russia) that come into play.
I mentioned Estonia before. So far as I know, their level of protection is the same as in US - restricting speech requires imminent danger stemming from that speech. So no political speech, no matter how hateful, can be restricted, unless it is inciting imminent violence. It also has fairly lax libel laws, which is also a benefit
Geographic proximity has both upsides and downsides - the downside is that something that affects US is also more likely to affect Canada than any other nation (except, perhaps, Mexico).
As far as threat consideration, you have a point there - but I think that having a distributed network of server mirrors is part of mitigating any such sudden threats against any particular one. In a sense, something like a Russian invasion can probably be treated similarly to, say, a possibility of a major earthquake on the West Coast disrupting infrastructure.
But yes. I do see how Canada is probably the easiest to set up for someone in US. If they just want something done right now, as immediate mitigation, and consider better options later, it makes sense.
