The Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) Peterborough chapter called a public meeting on April 25th at Emmanuel United Church on George Street to discuss concerns regarding what they defined as a “conflict” with the P. R. Community & Student Association (PRCSA)—the non-profit organization which operates Sadleir House—over allocation of office and storage space.

Members of the community were asked to come and take part in the meeting in order to provide a forum to discuss OPIRG’s situation and the relationship between Sadleir House and the wider community of Trent students and the residents of Peterborough–Nogojiwanong. 

Significantly, Sadleir House staff and directors of the PRCSA Board were asked not to attend the meeting. 

According to an April 22nd statement from OPIRG, the group had been asked to vacate their office and storage space on the main floor of Sadleir House by August 31st, 2024. In return, OPIRG explained that they had been offered 46 square feet of storage room.

This reduction in space, OPIRG insisted, would place one of their major community initiatives, the Free Market, in jeopardy. 

“The free market is a mutual aid program started by Trent students in 2005 and hosted by OPIRG Peterborough,” the group’s statement reads before noting that the loss of access to this space in Sadleir House “without an adequate alternative will effectively kill the Free Market.”

Prior to the Pandemic, the Free Market operated directly out of OPIRG’s storage space affixed to their first floor office in Sadleir House, but since then the organization has moved to operating it as a pop-up event at various locations around the City following public consultation and a program review in 2020 which created a working group for the project.

While informal conversations about the possibility of OPIRG needing to move spaces had been ongoing since early 2023, OPIRG’s Coordinator, Nico Koyanagi, noted that it wasn’t until October 2023 that OPIRG received a letter from both Sadleir House’s Management and Board Chair explaining that they were being asked to move to a new office while their storage space would be reduced to approximately 20% of their current capacity.

“We were told we have two weeks to accept or decline the proposal,” Koyanagi said during the public meeting. “So we accepted the proposal with the hopes that we can have further conversation, but the conversations and moving really slowly, which brought us to this point.”

This timing of these conversations as well as when letter to OPIRG was sent has been confirmed both by published minutes of the PRSCA Board and a timeline of events provided to Arthur by PRCSA and Sadleir House staff.

A copy of the letter from obtained by Arthur cites "capacity, security, and accessibility" as the main reasons behind their request for OPIRG to accept alternative spaces within the house which came after "months of discussion between the staff of our organizations."

The letter concludes by stating that "subsidized main floor space at the scale of what every other organizations in the house enjoys and a shared basement storage area for OPIRG and others looking for similar service is what we have to offer."

The letter also explains that the September 2023-August 2024 lease would be the final lease extended to OPIRG for their current office space and goes on to explain while a previously offered office has since become unavailable, Sadleir House was willing to hold a space on the main floor for OPIRG to move into following the end of their current lease in August 2024.

"If these terms are not accepted by November 15th 2023 we will begin looking for a new tenent for the space," the letter says. "When the room is filled there will no longer be any available office space at Sadleir."

In the hours prior to the public meeting a statement from the staff of Sadleir House stated that their most recent proposal had included “a combination of main floor office space and a 185 square foot storage space” which would mean a total reduction in OPIRG’s space within Sadleir House of about 130 square feet, but would also allow sufficient storage for the Free Market program.

According to the statement from Sadleir House, the motivation behind asking OPIRG to relocate is Sadleir’s intention to continue to increase accessibility within the 130 year old building, which at one point was part of the former Peter Robinson College at Trent University.

Part of these renovations includes the redevelopment of part of what is currently the OPIRG office into an accessible washroom. 

“Everyone deserves to be able to access a bathroom, and one of the renovations that we will embark upon as soon as Fall of 2024 is the construction of an accessible and gender neutral first-floor bathroom on the east side of the building,” Sadleir House staff wrote.

During the public meeting Koyanagi recognized that while the idea of an accessible washroom has been mentioned during the ongoing conversations—dating back even further to 2021—“the placement of the washroom hadn’t really been brought to our attention for a couple of years now. 

Despite this Koyanagi, noted that Sadleir House’s most recent offer has been tentatively accepted and would later write to Arthur to confirm and clarify that the offer would still need to be approved by the organization’s Board and that she cannot make these decisions by herself.

“We both agreed it would be good to have a mediated discussion between both OPIRG and Sadleir House,” Koyanagi wrote of the meeting which led to this offer by Sadleir House.

Rather she said that she understood the main impetus behind OPIRG being asked to move was so that Sadleir could create “more bookable space” on the first floor of the building, something she implied had to do with Sadleir House’s move towards more “financialisation” of the facility rather than serving as a community hub.

Putting aside the issue of office space, the meeting also served as a means of broaching larger concerns regarding how Sadleir House is operating as a community space.  

“I think we would love to see Sadleir House reinstated as a radical community space where everyone is welcome, and serving as community hub, bridging Trent to the broader community, and yet also serving as a valuable resource to our movements for social justice,” Koyanagi said. 

“We see it moving more towards not being accessible and being more financialised,” she continued. “We just want to make sure that there's processes of accountability, like I said, I think the folks at Sadleir House have the best of intentions but haven't been able to hear our concerns.”

In public documents released in preparation for the PRCSA’s Annual General Meeting, staff note that due to the 100% discounts for students looking to books the space and the 50% discount given to non-profit groups who wish to utilize bookable space in the building, Sadleir House saved students and non-profit groups an estimated $97,501.50 from September 2022–August 2023.

Rooms within Sadleir House were booked by students and groups for a total of 2509 hours, or 104 days over the same timeframe and activities included public lectures, meetings, and workshops—many of which were open to the community.

Sadleir House also provided 2,612 free cups of coffee and 1,300 free cups of tea to students over the course of the year alongside 2000 free condoms and 1000 each of pads and tampons all while while offering the eight student organisations who rented space in the house that year a 50% discount on rent—savings which are included in the $97,501.50 figure stated above.

These subsidies are financed largely by the financial contributions of Trent University undergraduate students through the university’s ancillary levy fee system—of which OPIRG Peterborough and the PRCSA are both recipients.

Further concerns brought forward by Koyanagi on behalf of OPIRG hinged upon the installation of key card access during the pandemic which, while she recognizes was a measure undertaken in order to comply with provincial contact-tracing mandates, she now sees as antithetical to the stated aims of Sadleir House to provide a “radical” meeting place between Trent students and the wider Peterborough-Nogojiwanong community.

Key card access is available to Trent students who register their card on an online form found on the Sadleir House website as well as to tenants and members of groups who rent offices within the building. 

Sadleir House staff have since told Arthur that the continued use of keycard access is based on student staff’s feedback that limiting access to those with keycards gives them peace of mind while working alone, often at night and in the early morning, while the building is open.

Crucially, Sadleir House’s main entrances include doorbells for anyone in the community who would like to gain access while the building is open to the public between 9 AM and 9 PM Monday-Saturday.

Community members who do not have key card access are encouraged to ring the bell and a member of staff or a tenant of the building will let them in.  

The keycard system also allows for Sadleir House to roughly track the number of people entering the building over the course of a year, meaning staff and the PRCSA board can more easily respond the the growing need for space within the house by leaning on information about the growing number of registered students and traffic through the house.

Due to this system, staff can now accurately state that Sadleir House’s registered student population now equals 10% of the overall population of Trent University. This represents a significant growth over  the 2022-23 fiscal year, which saw 846 registered users while Sadleir was able to track over 11,500 entries of the building by registered students, or about 48 students per day making use of the building during regular hours. 

Another concern raised by Koyanagi was the condensing of the number of books housed within the Alternative Resource Library in the summer of 2021. 

During the pandemic, Sadleir House staff started the process of condensing and curating the extensive collection of over 20,000 volumes held in storage and in doing so reached out to local libraries, including the extensive and inter-related collection which still exists at Traill College, Trent University, and the Peterborough Public Library to see about the possibility of further integrating the collections. 

Many books were eventually given away for free to the community over the course of the summer of 2022, while a smaller curated collection of social justice oriented books still exists in Sadleir House’s Library of Justice and Senior Common Room on the second floor.

When asked by Arthur to elaborate on what the process might look like moving forward, Koyanagi wrote that “I think this will be messy but this is a start to the conversation.”

“I put off having this conversation with the wider community for so long because I wasn’t sure what was the best way to go about it, but this is us trying to push the conversation forward as imperfect as it may be.”

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Editors' note: This story has been updated to more clearly depict the timeline of communications between OPIRG and Sadleir House Staff based on documents which had not been available to Arthur at the time of initial publication.