How far is Prime Minister Paul Martin's government prepared to go to fight terror? Too far, if recent signals from Ottawa are any indication. As Canada's anti-terror laws undergo Parliamentary review, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler has mused about expanding the federal government's power to slap draconian "control measures" on people suspected of terrorist ties. Cotler has suggested that anyone in Canada, citizen and non-citizen alike, should be subject to the controls. Right now they are applied only to non-Canadians who arrive here, and are found ineligible to stay because they threaten public safety. They can be held in detention until deported, or are held under a kind of house arrest. Consider the case of Adil Charkaoui, one of a handful of such cases. The Morocco-born man came here in 2003, but was deemed a security risk because of his ties to a banned Moroccan terror group that sympathized with Al Qaeda. Charkaoui was denied entry and ordered deported. Rather than go, he chose to spend 21 months in voluntary detention in Montreal, fighting the ruling. These cases take an unreasonably long time to wend their way through the courts.On Feb. 17, Mr. Justice Simon Noel of Federal Court decided there is no pressing need to hold Charkaoui in custody while he makes his legal case to remain here, because he can be controlled through house arrest.

Noel ordered Charkaoui released on $50,000 bail, and imposed other strict conditions. Charkaoui will have to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet. He must observe a dusk-to-dawn curfew, be accompanied when he leaves home, and surrender his passport. He can't use a computer, cell phone, Blackberry, fax or pager. He cannot leave Montreal or communicate with a list of proscribed people.

In short, he has been stripped of rights we take for granted.

In Charkaoui's case, and in the handful of others involving non-citizens, these restrictions are defensible. He is not a Canadian, has little legal standing here, has unsavoury connections and can free himself from the restrictions by leaving.

The same controls, though, would be out of place on Canadian citizens who have been charged with no crime, and who may have nowhere else to go. We are not so threatened by terror that we must subject the entire population to extreme measures.

Yet Cotler has floated the idea of amending the Anti-Terrorism Act to give the federal government the power to impose the same kind of controls on citizens. It is an outrageous overreaching, an affront to Canadian freedoms, and it is utterly unnecessary.

The act already empowers officials to arrest and jail even Canadian citizens, with a judge's approval, to prevent an "imminent" terror attack. That should suffice. In fact, it's a power that has not been used.

Do Canadian citizens sometimes inspire concern? Certainly. Ahmed Said Khadr, who arrived in Canada from Egypt in 1977, was identified as an Al Qaeda financier before he was killed. Several of his family appeared to be Al Qaeda sympathizers. But Ottawa does not need the draconian power to impose prior restraint on every citizen in this country without charging them with an offence, in order to keep tabs on a few.

Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan said recently our anti-terror laws need only "fine-tuning" because they strike the right balance between protecting national security and upholding civil rights.

Subjecting 32 million Canadians to draconian prior restraints in the name of fighting terror would be anything but fine-tuning.

It would be an assault on our collective civil rights.