When you hear the phrase “millennium time capsule,” you’d think that any capsule from the beginning of the 21st century—the year 2000—would be opened at some time towards the end of that allotted period—say the year 3000 or so.

Sure, some places would do it a little differently: unearth a time capsule 50 to 100 years after its burial and bury something in its place for future generations. My point here is that a substantial amount of time should pass before such a vessel is ripe for breach. 

Not in Peterborough!

After only 25 years inside its fountain, the Millennium Park time capsule was unearthed to media (including me!) and the public at a ceremony on the morning of August 6th, 2025. Residents were “invited to witness the unsealing and see a selection of items that captured life in Peterborough at the dawn of the 21st century,” according to a press release. 

The time capsule was commissioned under the mayorship of Sylvia Sutherland during the celebrations of Peterborough’s 150th anniversary in 2000, aptly named “Celebration 2000.”

The ceremony featured speeches from Mayor Jeff Leal, former city staff involved with the Celebration 2000 time capsule, representatives from the Nogojiwanong Friendship Centre and the New Canadians Centre, along with performances from Naandewegaan—Healing With Drums and poet Sam Banton. 

As Mayor Leal began his land acknowledgment, someone towards the back of the crowd (of about 70 people) began to boo him.

“He bulldozed over our ball diamonds!” he yelled as some attendees began to shush and argue with him. 

This heckling flustered the mayor to the point where he began to yell while saying “Nogojingwagnon.” 

This was not the last gaffe of the day: a display of old Peterborough Examiner clippings from the year 2000 would cause some controversy, as Peterborough Tourism staff asked media not to take pictures of a specific news clipping featuring a convicted sex offender. 

“This was really controversial at the time,” Mayor Leal told the Examiner’s Sebastian Johnston-Lindsay and myself after the ceremony. Sipping an oversized lemonade, he regaled us about how he’d be 95 in 25 years.

“Maybe I’ll get wheeled down from the Princess Gardens [retirement living] to see it again,” he laughed. 

Millennium Park hosts many monuments and installations in an attempt to incorporate Peterborough’s cultural, political, and industrial history in one stretch of publicly accessible space. The park has dedications to injured workers, family members lost, and dozens more causes worth memorializing. 

The sheer amount of these stones and statues in the park imparts not a sense of historicized wherewithal, but a fixation with capturing moments in time which elude even a settlement city like Peterborough. 

Walking through the Otonabee River Trail always feels like wandering through a graveyard. The placement of memorials feels incredibly random and unfocused because they are simply just everywhere. You could trip in Millennium Park and find a rock with a bronze placard. 

A monument of less prominent note is indeed the time capsule, which now rests inside of the masonry of the Millennium Park Fountain. The contents of the 2000 time capsule include brochures for local arts and cultural institutions, annual statistics, flags, and other timely paraphernalia, which will be on display at the Peterborough Musuem and Archives beginning August 22. 

I cannot emphasize the sheer size and scope of this capsule enough: There are over 46 artifacts in the 2000 capsule’s collection, including CD-ROMs, commemorative coins, historical photographs of the area, and even newspapers of the day. Its contents are sentimental, especially the documentation of the Peterborough babies born at the beginning of the millennium.

The capsule was thanks to the efforts of not only the community of Peterborough, but the tireless efforts of Celebration 2000 committee members like former city staffers Ken Armstrong and Janine Simard-Rose, who were present at the 2000 capsule’s opening. 

Even the letter from then-Mayor Sylvia Sutherland is forward-looking from a time and geography which has utterly changed in the last 25 years.

Read by Mayor Leal at the ceremony, Sutherland’s letter boasts a Peterborough well-situated in the Canada of 2000, which was ranked as the best country to live in by the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) at the time, despite Canada’s abuse of the statistic. 

Sutherland writes that Canada is “a nation that is the envy of the world, and in this most envied of all nations, we live in a community that is the envy of many others.” 

The Peterborough that Sutherland describes is not completely severed from the present, however.

“We're facing the challenges of de-industrialization by building a new economy based on knowledge, technology and service,” Sutherland writes. “We're building an economy that will allow our young people to stay here, to earn a living, raise a family, to return here once that the urge overtakes them to find themselves elsewhere, as it often does.” 

The optimism behind the new millennium is easily captured in the time capsule’s contents. It illustrates the hopes and dreams of a thriving Peterborough, yet the reality of the future—the Peterborough of now—stamps that joyousness out. 

Only 12 items from three organizations—the City of Peterborough, the Nogojiwanong Friendship Centre, and the New Canadians Centre—were included in the 2025 time capsule. 

While the initiative was supported by the former city staff who were involved in the original project, the lack of wider community involvement is reflected in how insular and constrained the scope of this new collection is. 

The contents provided by the City are photos taken at the unveiling on August 6th, a Visit Peterborough brochure and destination guide, a rack card, and the letter from Mayor Jeff Leal. The other organizations did provide photos and art in a similar vein to what was placed in the last capsule, yet the new collection of items pales in comparison to the careful curation of the 2000 capsule. 

There’s nothing to commemorate the current industries of the city, nothing to illustrate Peterborough statistically, and very little contribution from the arts and cultural community that this city prides itself on fostering. 

There are no contents from the educational or service-based sectors that now dominate Peterborough’s local economy: nothing from Fleming College or Trent University or any of the larger employers or institutions in Peterborough. There’s very little representing the broader make-up of Peterborough, save for a municipal corporation disliked by its public and two non-profits.

While the capsule attempts to reflect the diversity of our city, it does so in an insular, performative way: only two of the many community-based organizations—be it two vital organizations which provide essential services to newcomers and Indigenous people—unfortunately do not paint the entire picture of local advocacy.  

This move to only have the New Canadians Centre and the Nogojiawanong Friendship Centre provide contents to the latest time capsule feels similar to things I’ve seen at Black History Month Proclamations or any other celebration of cultural diversity that isn’t related to Peterborough’s settlement 200 years ago. These organizations—and by extension the people they serve and symbolically represent by virtue of their presence—are tokenized while the arrival of Irish settlers 200 years ago is enthusiastically celebrated and embraced. 

The narrative of Peter Robinson and Irish immigration to the area are upheld with uncritical reverence, which anyone can easily glean from the City of Peterborough’s enthusiasm for celebrating the achievements of the Nine Ships project and Irish settlement. People that aren’t white settlers feel incidental to the collective history of Peterborough, and this time capsule unfortunately reflects that. 

Moments like the 2025 time capsule attempt to revise the history of this city, but future generations will have to reckon a more critical history of this moment in Peterborough. There have been multiple municipal scandals within the last couple of years—namely our current mayor dodging accountability measures for saying a racist slur, yelling at his coworkers, and implying he is in fact the victim of a public witchhunt—which have drawn the ire of the public against the City of Peterborough.

The narrowing scope of the capsule’s contents to three organizations is testament to the tight leash on Peterborough’s public image. As a result, there’s very little personality to this capsule, whereas the Celebration 2000 capsule provides a more fulsome picture of its Peterborough than the 2025 capsule does of today’s. 

The total historical intentions of Millennium Park—including the installation of the time capsule—are disconnected from the Peterborough of 2025. The performance of the unveiling was chaotic, rudely awakened from its myth-making with the current reality of living in Peterborough. The new capsule does not offset this, but rather calls attention to it. 

Everybody wants to be remembered. I get it: this is the driving reason behind why many people do what they do. While the City of Peterborough wishes to celebrate the past while looking ahead to the future, they also wish to control what future generations will see. 

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is our gift to the next generation, a snapshot of today reserved for tomorrow,” Mayor Jeff Leal remarked in closing. 

What a gift indeed.