THUNDER BAY — A First Nations organization is expressing "severe disappointment" with the library at being pushed out after seven years tenancy and investing over $1 million in renovations.
However, the CEO of the Thunder Bay Public Library says his organization followed and abided by the terms of the leases the two parties signed over the years.
“The Thunder Bay Public Library is always committed to honouring our agreements, and that is exactly what we've done in this case,” said Richard Togman.
Anishinabek Employment and Training Services doesn’t agree. “They're not complying to the spirit of reconciliation at all,” said Sharon Ostberg, a director on the board of the organization and senior councillor with Biigtigong Nishnaabeg.
In December 2024, said Ostberg, they were told they had to be out of the library in three months, although AETS and the library have since agreed to extend that until the end of May. The soon-to-be former AETS space at Waverley will be used for an expanded children’s section.
The termination of the lease, says AETS, is counter to a long-term agreement the organization had with the library — committing to work together in areas of reconciliation and making the space more welcoming to Indigenous people.
“In my view, this is a very, very missed opportunity for reconciliation with Indigenous people,” said Ostberg.
“To me, I think it's really piss-poor treatment.”
On Tuesday, at Waverley, workers were continuing to dismantle the space and clear out remaining property.
In total, AETS said it’s put over $1 million into the library’s properties at Waverley and Brodie, and is now getting nothing back.
Those improvements, the organization said, included barrier-free and gender-neutral washrooms, a boardroom, a kitchen, an elders-in-residence space, electrical upgrades and ventilation upgrades that allowed for smudging.
Togman said the lease terms stipulated that any improvements would “stay property of the library upon their eventual exit and no remuneration would be considered at that time.”
AETS’s tenancy at the library has been governed by a series of leases. The two sides initially signed a three-year lease in 2018, with the parties agreeing to one-year leases through 2022 and 2023.
In 2021, AETS has the opportunity to sign on to a long-term lease of up to eight years but declined, said Togman. AETS executive director John DeGiacomo said the terms they were presented with at the time were not acceptable.
“We were never given an eight-year lease that had terms that were reasonable,” he said, necessitating the subsequent short-term renewals. AETS has been on a month-to-month tenancy, said Ostberg, since the second one-year lease expired.
Togman said all of the uncertainty around whether the Thunder Bay Public Library was going to get space at Intercity Shopping Centre (his central library proposal was eventually voted down by city council), necessitated the change to month-to-month agreements and, eventually, the library taking space back.
“If we had had more space in Intercity, or perhaps elsewhere in the city, we wouldn't have had the types of pressures that resulted in this decision,” he said. “This is really coming from the library having a critical shortage of space.”
Although the lease was month-to-month, AETS leadership describe the situation as an early termination of the overall partnership agreement the two sides initially agreed to.
“The intention was to be in the library for years and years and years beyond what they've done,” DeGiacomo said. “So, certainly there's been a period where it was month-to-month, because they delayed the renewal of being in a full lease that would make everybody comfortable.”
AETS is a partnership of, and represents, nine First Nations in the North Shore and Lake Nipigon areas north and east of Thunder Bay, including Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, where Ostberg sits on council.
For AETS, this all means now having to move its programming into new locations. Ostberg said they’ve got space secured at the former Dawson Court building that is now owned by Matawa, as well as at Goods & Co. Market.
“I'm not saying that because we don't have the (library) space we're going to do less — we'll continue to do more because that's the kind of people we are,” Ostberg said.
“We're going continue to fight for our individuals and we'll pick up and we'll move on.”
