Maybe. I don't know. But law enforcement routinely lie, so I default to not taking them at face value. If I had a pressing medical need or something like that, I would probably bet differently.

I was asking because while I have never had a personal experience regarding the subject, one of my wife's (US citizen) friends was once locked up in the United Arab Emirates for the heinous crime of being drunk and it took quite a bit of effort to get him out of jail (and even then he wasn't allowed to leave the country for another 6 months) and he received _zero_ assistance from the US government. Now obviously Canada is not comparable to the United Arab Emirates in this regard but clearly when you're abroad you enjoy no legal protection beyond what the host nation's local laws provide you with?

Unlike in the US, illegal and unadmitted entrants to Canada, the UK, Australia (and probably everywhere else) don't have constitutional protection. So while a Canadian could possibly protest, a non-Canadian really hasn't got a leg to stand on.

> Unlike in the US

No, just like the US:

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

Um, no. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms specifically grants rights to everyone and not just Canadian citizens. Except in a few cases like mobility rights where the right is specifically restricted to citizens.

A non citizen can be refused entry but they absolutely have a right to not be arbitrarily detained.

Sadly, that's not true. Read this paper titled "How the Charter Has Failed Non‐Citizens in Canada – Reviewing Thirty Years of Supreme Court of Canada Jurisprudence".

[1]http://www.fondationtrudeau.ca/sites/default/files/u5/articl...

Most of these are about deportation and immigration, where it's clear that non-citizens do not have a right to remain in Canada and are trying to use other sections of the charter to say, for example, that deportation would deprive them of section 7 rights. Of course many of these types of claims will fail.

But I'm not seeing where "non citizens have no rights" or the court says that whole sections cannot be applied to non-citizens and the word everyone doesn't mean what we think. In fact I'm seeing some rulings where the court acknowledged for example that equality rights do apply to non citizens.

I am seeing a case where they allowed someone to be detained, but it seems they found a way to decide that the restriction was reasonable and therefore constitutional, but they didn't decide that non-citizens cannot benefit from this right.

The American constitution obviously doesn't apply in the UK, but laws like the Human Rights Act do, and regardless of nationality.