On December 7th, 2023, whilst distributing copies of Arthur Issue 3 on Trent University’s campus, the editors of Arthur were struck by a sudden bolt of inspiration.

For weeks previous, we had filled long and weary days in our Sadleir House office by indulging our morbid obsessions.

Well, one obsession in particular—namely the long-standing saga of the university’s proposed Cleantech Commons land development. The Research & Innovation park has its roots as far back as 2013, in the original draft of the Trent Lands Plan, though it was not until December of 2017 that the project was formalized under the title of “Cleantech Commons.”

In the years since, the project has been a major item of discussion at any number of Trent Board of Governors meetings, and seemingly a point of pride for the university with regards to its approach to environmental development and innovation. 

Since its formal announcement in 2017, however, the project has struggled to find anchor tennants—let alone get off the ground in any meaningful way. Indeed, it has been a sore spot in relations between the City of Peterborough and Trent for at least the past two budget cycles. 

To date, the City has spent in excess of $10M to service the barren property and to bring roads up to municipal standards. This “significant investment in serviced employment lands” on the part of the City, coupled with Trent’s lack of viable tenants has resulted in Councillors and Mayor Jeff Leal implicitly questioning the vision for Cleantech, and wondering if perhaps Trent need to become “flexible” in their expectations of the kind of companies who will set up on this location.

Despite these concerns, in 2024 Trent will receive $136,000 from the City which will help fund the costs of tenant attraction, travel to and from conferences and meetings with government agencies, as well as marketing and communications strategies in collaboration with Peterborough Kawarthas Economic Development (PKED).

Additionally, as part of the arrangement, the City pays for half of the $160,000 salary of Cleantech’s Executive Director, Martin Yuill according to the City budget. In response to a question regarding this specific arrangement, Trent only confirmed that the shared costs include salary and benefits, but did not mention Mr. Yuill by name.

Putting politics aside, as Trent no doubt would like to, “Canada’s Premier Cleantech Destination”—”85 acres of possibility” is set in a “picturesque” location conveniently situated just North of the city of Peterborough. To most people on the outside, however, it probably looks like a dirt lot. 

The truth is, it is a dirt lot; at least, a dirt lot with a road running through it. We know. We’ve been there. 

As we braced ourselves agains the snowy winds of Trent campus that dark Thursday evening, handing out copies of Arthur to eager students and clutching our quickly-cooling Tim Hortons coffees, we were struck by a sudden revelation. Cleantech Commons was less than a kilometre from us as the crow flies. We could, in all likelihood, just…go there.

Early in the morning of December 8th, the editors piled into Arthur journalist David King’s squat Hyundai Elantra Touring. Whilst our primary mission was to distribute Arthur to the other half of the river we’d missed the day before, the secondary objective at the front of everyone’s mind was a bit of on-the-ground snooping around our favourite journalistic special interest.

The first thing we remarked upon turning down Cleantech Commons Way was the waste of the landscape before us. Largely stripped of trees and walled by great bulldozed mounds of dirt, the freshly-laid and neatly paved road stands in stark contrast to the desolation of the surrounding scenery. 

The tallest thing for hundreds of meteres in any direction are street lights, perched tens of metres above the ground, looming like great henges or metal trees.

Otherwise, there are no trees at Cleantech Commons save the sparse stands of barren saplings, perhaps, but not trees of which to properly speak. 

The only greenery, save the cattails and pine trees which wall the Westerly side of the complex from Trent’s DNA building beyond, are swathes of tall grasses rendered a sickly colour by the year’s first frosts, now hunched in their fields as they flank the vacant roads.

Pedestrian paths criss-cross the roads here and there, winding their way up from Pioneer road to the South. Benches sit barren alongside the spotless sidewalks. A makeshift forum marks the edge of the site.

Why anyone would wish to walk here is beyond us. It’s hard to emphasize to the appropriate degree just how much of nothing is here. One can hardly wind up at Cleantech Commons by mistake—though the site itself possesses roads and walkways, they lead nowhere, terminate at random, and confer only an aspiration that someday, they just might go somewhere, wherever that happens to be.

It’s worth noting, again, that even this lot is hardly the work of Trent University. The infrastructural undertakings thus far are by-and-in-large the efforts of the City of Peterborough; to provide vehicular and pedestrian access, a water link to the site, and an electrical complement to sorely needed employment lands within the City’s limits.

You know, the bare minimum.

1 Cleantech Commons Way, as it exists presently, is exactly the lowest possible threshold to be declared something other than nothing—a non-place which itself exists, if only in technicality. Google Maps does not even acknowledge the existence of the site. At time of writing the closest one can get to the concession that yes, there is a road here, is the grainy images of construction equipment laying asphalt one will see should they switch to satellite mode.

It’s a stark contrast to the promises of the web site, even more so to the cinema-standard drone footage for which Trent has shelled out to document these two roads and an intersection month-by-month through their construction. 

One needn’t be any sort of math major to imagine that this in itself must cost a lot of money, which in turn sways attention to the matter of where this money is coming from.

All this begs the question, in its existence: what is Cleantech actually for?

The short answer is one we already know: nothing. There remain no realistic bidders on the Cleantech Common site, and little interest, by all evidence, from any company in the sector interested in cooperating with the university on any potential development.

Despite the patently optimistic and obfuscating responses from the City and the University following the sale of Noble Gen to Solar Biotech last summer, there remains little in the way of tangible movement or indication that the company, now operating as Solar Biotech Canada, has undertaken a move to become the flagship tenant of the site. 

Immediately following the sale, Mr. Noble told Arthur that he saw “tremendous potential in combining our expertise with Cleantech Commons at Trent University” but shared no specifics.  

Perhaps all this is why ten years after its conception, with millions of dollars of University and City money poured into the project, it still fails to show any returns. 

There’s a particular irony in a proposed renewable technology R&D park being such an environmental eyesore, and being at the centre of its own environmental controversy. The site sits immediately next to a protected wetland, something the university has—on multiple occasions—proposed to build through, amid much protest from more environmentally conscious students and faculty. 

Perhaps Cleantech is best understood as embodying the dirty side of the green industry—the nasty little bits of industrial mechanization and profit motive which drive this sort of publicly-funded but privately interested enterprise. 

What, you may ask, is the point in writing this, then? If it amounts to nothing more than another moneysink, why divert valuable time to the matter?

Well, there’s the expedient fact of where Trent gets its money from—students, in no small part—students who chose Trent at least in part because of its image of environmental prestige and stewardship. It’s telling that the Cleantech undertaking does not wholly reflect this curated image of Trent, the idyllic granola school, the forward-thinking leader in environmental studies. 

Strip away the wrappings, and you find another company (for after all Trent is a company at the end of the day) trying to carve up a plot of land in the hopes of turning it into a money machine.

The second is to tell the university that there are eyes on them. While they have, for years, seemingly operated under a believed impunity with regards to this project in particular, Trent doesn’t have the luxury of presuming that it is exempt from scrutiny.

Keeping an eye on Cleantech Commons—even by ridiculing the rightly laughable effort which Trent has produced thus far—is essential to ensuring students, faculty, and graduate fellows retain their voice in a project that many of them have a vested interest in. It brings Trent down to our level. 

Whether Cleantech Commons will eventually be the dazzling R&D park of the future Trent promises remains firmly in the realm of speculation. There’s no clear indication, as it stands, that Cleantech will ever get built, let alone in the near future Trent continually implies with bated breath.

For the time being it remains as it is, an unremarkable dirt lot, which cost the City of Peterborough a lot of money. Don’t take it from Trent. Take it from us, because we went there so you wouldn’t have to.