Public debates structure election cycles, feature in news media, and are privileged as a form of academic exchange. Yet, public debate is poorly understood from the perspective of political theory. While theorists often talk about “public debate,” they usually mean diffuse discussion on a topic in the public sphere. This article considers how literal public debates—multisided, publicly accessible and publicly oriented performances of reason-giving—may be normatively distinct from other forms of rhetoric. Drawing on the “constructivist turn” in the scholarship on representation and the philosophy of Gadamer, I offer a hermeneutical approach for assessing public debates. I argue that public debates do not merely provide a platform for opinions to be broadcast, they also purport to provide a representative spectrum of opinions. In so doing, they help to construct the borders of the public sphere itself. I conclude by considering the significance of protest to public debate.

For three weeks in early 2022, the streets of downtown Ottawa were occupied by protestors associated with the so-called Freedom Convoy. The inability of Ottawa's municipal police to end the protest was not only a spectacular failure of local policing but also a failure of national security policy. This article brings together literatures on Canadian federalism, multilevel politics and federal capitals to argue that the occupation of Ottawa demonstrates a misalignment between the political and jurisdictional responsibility for Ottawa's public and national security. Potential reforms range from the expansion of federal authority over the Parliamentary Precinct to the restructuring of the National Capital Region as a federal district or territory.

This article addresses second-wave feminist interventions in Canadian foreign policy debate with reference to two analytic streams: (1) political science and international relations (IR) perspectives since the late 1990s that stress the formal decisional aims of advocacy and the role of transnational networks in pressuring reluctant governments and (2) sociological approaches that underline movements’ cultural as well as statist dimensions and the significance of their domestic political strategies. Examining engagement by the Voice of Women (VOW) in nuclear weapons debates and National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) in free trade controversies confirms sociological expectations of campaigners’ varied claims and contributions and the importance of their political rootedness in Canada. Consistent with political science and IR arguments, the study finds NAC paid growing attention to international political opportunities in 1990 and following. The conclusion considers implications of the analysis and directions for future research.