The Munk Debates are a semi-annual series of debates on major policy issues held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. They are run by the Aurea Foundation, a charitable foundation set up by Peter Munk, founder of Barrick Gold, and his wife Melanie Munk. The debate series was founded in 2008 by Munk and Rudyard Griffiths, who moderates most of the debates.
The Munk debates are held in Toronto, at steadily larger venues as they have proven popular. Tickets are sold to the general public, and sell out shortly after being made available.
A poll is taken from the audience both before and after each debate. The winner of the debate is determined by how many people are persuaded to move from one opinion side to the other. The debates have been broadcast on CBC Radio's Ideas as well as CPAC. The more recent ones have also appeared on international broadcasters including BBC and C-SPAN.
| Date | Topic | Pro | Con | Winner | Swing | Venue | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 26, 2008 | Be it resolved, the world is a safer place with a Republican in the White House... | Charles Krauthammer and Niall Ferguson | Samantha Power and Richard Holbrooke | Pro | 17% | Royal Ontario Museum | |
| Dec 1, 2008 | Be it resolved, if countries like Sudan, Somalia and Burma will not end their man-made humanitarian crises, the international community should... | Gareth Evans and Mia Farrow | John Bolton and Rick Hillier | Con | 9% | Royal Ontario Museum | |
| June 1, 2009 | Be it resolved, foreign aid does more harm than good... | Hernando de Soto Polar and Dambisa Moyo | Stephen Lewis and Paul Collier | Pro | 2% | Royal Ontario Museum | |
| Dec 1, 2009 | Be it resolved, climate change is mankind's defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response... | George Monbiot and Elizabeth May | Bjørn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson | Con | 8% | The Royal Conservatory of Music | |
| June 7, 2010 | Be it resolved, I would rather get sick in the United States than Canada... | Bill Frist and David Gratzer | Howard Dean and Robert Bell | Con | 7% | The Royal Conservatory of Music | |
| Nov 26, 2010 | Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world... | Tony Blair | Christopher Hitchens | Con | 13% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| June 17, 2011 | Be it resolved, the 21st century will belong to China... | Niall Ferguson and David Daokui Li | Henry Kissinger and Fareed Zakaria | Con | 22% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| Nov 14, 2011 | Be it resolved, North America faces a Japan-style era of high unemployment and slow growth... | Paul Krugman and David Rosenberg | Lawrence Summers and Ian Bremmer | Con | 19% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| May 25, 2012 | Be it resolved, the European experiment has failed... | Niall Ferguson and Josef Joffe | Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Peter Mandelson | Con | 17% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| November 26, 2012 | Be it resolved, the world cannot tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons capability... | Amos Yadlin and Charles Krauthammer | Fareed Zakaria and Vali Nasr | Con | 18% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| May 30, 2013 | Be it resolved, tax the rich (more)... | George Papandreou and Paul Krugman | Newt Gingrich and Arthur Laffer | Pro | 12% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| November 15, 2013 | Be it resolved, men are obsolete... | Hanna Rosin and Maureen Dowd | Caitlin Moran and Camille Paglia | Pro | 28% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| May 2, 2014 | Be it resolved, state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms.... | Michael Hayden and Alan Dershowitz | Glenn Greenwald and Alexis Ohanian | Con | 13% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| November 5, 2014 | Be it resolved, Obama’s foreign policy is emboldening our enemies and making the world a more dangerous place… | Bret Stephens and Robert Kagan | Anne-Marie Slaughter and Fareed Zakaria | Con | 11% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| April 10, 2015 | Be it resolved, the West should engage not isolate Russia… | Stephen F. Cohen and Vladimir Pozner | Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov | Con | 10% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| Sept 28, 2015 | The Munk Debate on Canada's Foreign Policy | Stephen Harper, Tom Mulcair, Justin Trudeau | – | – | Roy Thomson Hall | ||
| November 6, 2015 | Be it resolved, humankind’s best days lie ahead... | Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley | Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell | Pro | 2% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| April 1, 2016 | Be it resolved, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free... | Louise Arbour and Simon Schama | Nigel Farage and Mark Steyn | Con | 22% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| September 30, 2016 | Be it resolved, Donald Trump can make America great again... | Newt Gingrich and Laura Ingraham | Robert Reich and Jennifer Granholm | Pro | 6% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| April 28, 2017 | Be it resolved, the liberal international order is over… | Niall Ferguson | Fareed Zakaria | Con | 5% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| October 12, 2017 | Be it resolved, American democracy is in its worst crisis in a generation and Donald J. Trump is to blame… | Andrew Sullivan and E. J. Dionne | Newt Gingrich and Kimberly Strassel | Con | 3% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| May 18, 2018 | Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress… | Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg | Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson | Con | 6% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| November 2, 2018 | Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist not liberal... | Steve Bannon | David Frum | Tie* | 0% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| May 9, 2019 | Be it resolved, China is a threat to the liberal international order... | H. R. McMaster and Michael Pillsbury | Kishore Mahbubani and Wang Huiyao | Con* | 2% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| December 4, 2019 | Be it resolved, the capitalist system is broken. It's time to try something different... | Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Yanis Varoufakis | Arthur Brooks and David Brooks | Con | 2% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| May 12, 2022 | Be it resolved, ending the world’s worst geopolitical crisis in a generation starts with acknowledging Russia’s security interests... | John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt | Michael McFaul and Radosław Sikorski | Con | 34% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| November 30, 2022 | Be it resolved, don´t trust Mainstream Media | Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi | Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg | Pro | 39% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| June 22, 2023 | Be it resolved, AI research and development poses an existential threat. | Max Tegmark and Yoshua Bengio | Melanie Mitchell and Yann LeCun | Con | 3% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| November 3, 2023 | Be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right. | George Will and Jacob Rees-Mogg | Ash Sarkar and Sohrab Ahmari | Con | 14% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
| June 17, 2024 | Be it Resolved, anti-Zionism is antisemitism | Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff | Mehdi Hasan and Gideon Levy | Pro | 5% | Roy Thomson Hall | |
* Indicates a corrected count. The initial tally was incorrect; table includes the final, corrected accounting.
In 2018, the debates hosted Steve Bannon, resulting in calls by several Canadian politicians for that debate to be cancelled.[1] A rally outside Roy Thomson Hall over the debate resulted in the arrest of 12 people.[2] The debate was held anyway. The next day, the Munk Debates announced a correction: a "technical error" had led to releasing an inaccurate debate result, wrongly stating that Bannon's arguments had swayed the audience in favor of populism. Actually, there was no net change in audience opinion.[3]
In 2019, the debates continued to be "financially underwritten by the Canadian charitable foundation, Aurea."[4]
Munk Debates proposed a leaders debate on foreign policy during the 2019 Canadian election. Justin Trudeau, Andrew Scheer, Jagmeet Singh and Elizabeth May were invited. Singh, Scheer and May agreed to attend.[5] Maxime Bernier was not invited.[6]
The debate was cancelled when Trudeau refused to attend.[7]