Time for some fun, phone-free and future-ready skills development? Debate Camp inspires youth to confidently speak, debate and think on their feet! Our camps, located across Canada and the Northeastern US, provide a safe and welcoming space for students entering grade 5 to 10 to develop their public speaking and parliamentary debate skills.  8:30am - 4:30pm day camps are offered throughout the GTA as well as in Ottawa and Montreal. Our 9-day overnight camp is in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley.

Debate Camp opens young minds to world issues and helps kids engage others in constructive dialogue and debate - while having fun!  All ability levels welcome. Join us!

The Our Kids review of Debate Camp

Nick Szymanis founded Debate Camp Canada after having achieved a long and impressive career in private schooling. He held teaching and leadership positions at Havergal, Crofton House, and was director of academics at Sterling Hall. Director Oona Craig has a CV that is similarly impressive. In all, this is an academic camp that is placed very firmly on a foundation of academic experience and expertise. It’s not a traditional camp, of course, perhaps particularly because it’s not about providing a wide breadth of experiences, but rather an intensive focus on one: debating. That said, there is more breadth here than you might assume. Debate is a tool, like any camp activity, to get at other things, including confidence, resilience, skill development, and effective collaboration. The kids that attend find themselves in a group of peers that share their interests as well as their academic disposition, and many come away—as with any camp—with friends and memories for life.

Camp Address

Bridle Path, Toronto, North Toronto, Toronto, Montreal, QC, Humber Valley Village, Toronto

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• Arts & Crafts
• Public Speaking/Debate

Nick Szymanis, Director
BA, MA, B Ed

Debate Camp creates a learning experience that is safe, welcoming, fun, and intellectually-engaging.  Our program is meant to appeal to all ability levels, from the reluctant speaker to the already-accomplished debater.

We believe that learning is best served by engaging students in an academic experience, while at the same time ensuring they feel empowered to take risks. 

We believe that "camp" creates a novel and secure learning environment in which campers feel safe to try new skills, think on their feet, see the opposing view, and to trust their teammates. 

We feel that debating is not an elite skill for competition purposes only. We believe that to have advocacy skills, an ability with rhetoric, an ability to effectively organize one's thoughts, an ability to listen and be heard and to honour one's opponents with effective points and counter-points, are skills that all kids should try.  We believe these are empowering skills that are highly relevant to life long learning. 

Campers repeatedly inform us of how successful their academic experiences are - after Debate Camp, largely because they felt emboldened and confident in their ability to engage in discourse on subjects they felt unsure about only weeks previous.   " I learned so much"  is the most consistent feedback we get. 

Moreover, we remain about training in the area of verbal advocacy; to stand, speak and be heard - an area requiring continued attention at a time when digital means provide so many alternatives to this.  In the generation of the smart phone, of potentially less human-to-human conversation over substantial matters, what we teach is even more coveted...

Education has forever operated on a belief in the skills, ability and good intention of the future generation. Debate Camp is honoured to be invested in this work

More info on myself, my team and our great little camp - visit: www.debatecamp.com

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• Debate Camp Canada

  Debate Camp Canada has trained hundreds of eager speakers since it's start-up in the summer of 2002. Our camps have served the debate and public speaking communities in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. The new location of our residential camp, to Windsor Nova Scotia stands to make us truly a national program, with campers from across Canada attending each summer. In addition, we have opened two new day camps in the Toronto area and one in Vancouver, to serve all those eager students unable to make it to our annual overnight camp. Over the years, Shawnigan Lake School and Rosseau Lake College have provided great campus environments in which our programs have developed. Many debate and public speaking tournaments both in Canada and abroad, boast the participation of multiple debate campers from past summers - many of which have returned in the ranks of staff once actively competing at the university level. Our best stories certainly involve those campers who came to us, hesitant and often shy about public speaking and graduated after a few summers, with renewed self-confidence in a polished set of abilities that in some cases reaped rewards in tournaments or even just their own school's academic program. Moreover, everyone certainly had fun in the learning process. Join us in continuing this fine tradition.