About the project
Why HealthArchive.ca exists
This project grew out of concern that critical public health information can quietly change or disappear online. The goal is to create an independent, transparent record of what was published, when.
Motivation
Clinicians, public health practitioners, researchers, journalists, and members of the public rely on government websites for guidance and data. When web content is updated, moved, or removed, it can become difficult to reconstruct what information was available at a particular point in time.
HealthArchive.ca is an attempt to address that problem for Canadian public health information by creating a stable, independently managed record of key pages and documents.
Independence and non-partisanship
The project is independent and non-governmental. It does not speak for any public health agency, and it does not aim to replace official sources or to offer medical advice. Its focus is on preserving previously public information in a way that supports transparency, accountability, and research.
The project also aims to maintain a non-partisan tone: the existence of an archive should not be read as a statement about the intentions or motivations of any particular organization or government.
Project status
At this stage, HealthArchive.ca is an early technical demo. It illustrates how an archive explorer and snapshot viewer could behave, using a small set of hand-curated records. Crawl pipelines, storage strategies, and replay tooling are under active design and may change substantially before any production archive is launched.
As the project matures, the methods, governance, and sustainability plans will be documented in more detail, with explicit discussion of scope, limitations, and risks.