Classic in the sense that Led Zeppelin is "classic" rock. Both the Human Rights commissions and Jimmy Page's best guitar work date from the late 1960s and 1970s.  For most of Canadian history there was no issue regarding hate speech vs free speech.  With the exception of libel and blasphemy (the last enforced sporadically) the right to speak freely was par for the course.  It was one of those things that distinguished Canada from those benighted places everyone was trying to flee. The governments of the day assumed that British subjects - which we were until 1977 - were grown up enough to decide between common sense and nonsense. A politically correct minder appointed by the state would have seemed not just absurd but tyrannical. 

In the sense that poison and antidote work in balance, the latter remedying the effects of the former. One of the cliches of the inter-war period was that the problems of democracy could be cured by more democracy. The argument applies far better to free speech. Suppressing speech, even unpleasant speech, was seen as counter productive.  If something was false and wicked it would be easier fight in the open.  Turning wannabe Hitlers and Mussolinis into martyrs would accomplish nothing. A while back the Steyn observed that rather than trying to ban fascists in the 1930s, the British simply mocked them. PG Wodehouse invented the ludicrous character of Roderick Spode, the amateur dictator who designed ladies' undergarments in his spare time.  Spode was a send up of Oswald Mosley. One good joke, Wodehouse understood, does the job of thousands of eloquent denunciations: 

Sadly the one thing the modern human rights industry lacks is a sense of humour.