This is Canada. Things rarely happen dramatically here. They are usually incremental.

So it is with the erosion of freedom. In the United States, this erosion is there for all see. A government spooked by terrorists curtails vital civil liberties, violates its own constitution and authorizes torture.

No one can pretend not to understand what is going on.

But here in Canada, freedoms are eroded quietly. Bureaucrats meet; stakeholders are consulted. Regulations are passed into law with no fanfare.

Last Friday in Toronto, one of these incremental erosions surfaced briefly in the form of a so-called consultation among so-called stakeholders on something called the federal Marine Facilities Restricted Area Access Clearing Program.

Is that title opaque enough? It's meant to be.

The gist of the piece is that Ottawa is moving to beef up security at its major ports.

In itself, this is not a bad idea. For years, the federal government treated the country's ports as a costly nuisance.

With little police presence and virtually no inspection of arriving cargo, Canadian ports were obvious conduits for drugs.

Successive federal governments hemmed, hawed and hoped the problem would go away.

Then 9/11 happened, the American government began to pressure Canada to tighten up its borders and a Senate committee chaired by Colin Kenny recommended that something be done - which was fine.

But this is Canada. We are cheap, as well as devoted to the incremental. So, rather than spend money to check more incoming cargo, the federal government is proposing intrusive security checks of those who work at sensitive areas in the ports - that is, near the ships.

Some of these proposed checks strike me as sensible. The government would run port employees' names through police computers to check on criminal activity.

It would also run the names past the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, the country's spooks. Given that there are terrorists in the world, that, too, makes sense.

It would do credit checks on port workers. I'm not sure that will help much, but, given that almost every corporation has access to everyone's credit history anyway, this is probably not a major infringement on privacy.

But where the government goes too far is in proposing that it investigate the families of port employees - specifically their spouses, parents and spouses' parents.

And it wants employees to detail any place outside North America where they have travelled in the previous five years.

Of course, it reserves the right to pass on any of this information to Canada's many democratic allies, including Syria.

Exactly how any of these requirements would help secure Canada's ports is unclear to me. Suppose a longshoreman driving a forklift had travelled to, say, Pakistan. What would that mean?

Suppose another longshoreman was married to a woman whose immigrant father had once been jailed in Egypt? What would that mean?

The answer, of course, is that neither means anything. These kinds of questions make sense only in a world where people are judged by their ethnicity or their links to others.

These days, this is called profiling. It used to be called racism.

If you assume that all Pakistanis are terrorists, then it makes sense to bar from Canada's ports anyone who has ever visited that country.

The last time I checked, it was not Canada's policy to assume this.

Similarly, if you assume that (a) Egypt is a functioning liberal democracy unlikely to jail anyone without just cause, and (b) people do everything their in-laws tell them to do, then it makes sense to fire someone because his wife's father was once in a Cairo prison.

But in the Canada I used to know, the sins - real or imagined - of parents were not visited upon their children, while the sins of in-laws were considered quite immaterial.

The union representing Vancouver longshoremen is trying its best to deep-six these new intrusions. Tom Dufresne, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union says his members have been happy to co-operate with security changes implemented over the past few months, including new identity cards.

"This is too broad," he says. "And it's unneeded."

For it's part, the government says that similar background checks have been in place for airport workers since the Air India bombing of 1985, so what's the fuss?

To me, the fuss is pretty simple. Governments need to know some things. But the vast bulk of what people do is none of their business.

Oh yes, and if federal Transport Minister Jean Lapierre thinks that knowing where airport workers go for their holidays helps make air travel secure, he should take a look at another recent Senate committee report chaired by the ubiquitous Kenny. It's entitled, "The myth of security at Canada's airports."

Thomas Walkom writes every Tuesday.