a. Harvesting the documents into the Internet Archive in case the originals at Publications Canada go away, and
b. Using Stanford's open-source LOCKSS technology to create a widely replicated dark archive to ensure their persistence and availability in the event that the copies at the Internet Archive become unavailable, as happened recently in another context.
The marriage of the Internet Archive and LOCKSS is a bit of a natural, in that the IA has a built-in LOCKSS export function. While storing content in the IA won't necessarily ensure its long-term availability, it provides a very convenient way of getting content into LOCKSS, which most likely will. And for now at least, IA does provide an important access point for the collection.
This project had its origin in concerns attendant upon the winding down of the Depository Services program, wherein print copies of government documents were distributed to libraries across the country to ensure long-term preservation and access.
So, given our application of LOCKSS to preserving Canadian government content, it was interesting to see the Federal government's recent closure of a number of fishery, ocean and environmental libraries was the subject of a recent blog post by David Rosenthal, one of the LOCKSS project principals. His argument, which I think is sound, is that we we need the LOCKSS project's decentralized approach to digital preservation, rather than relying on centralized archives to serve that function.
Sadly, our initiative will do little to mitigate the loss of those libraries and what they contained (much of which only ever existed in print). But hopefully we can mitigate further losses down the line.