WINCHESTER — Soon to be replaced by a new multi-grain commodity board, the final days of the Ontario Wheat Producers’ Marketing Board are being marked with an elected director in the proverbial penalty box after he assailed the organization and other farming groups for a lack of leadership and unresponsiveness to their grass roots.

District 10 director John Vanderspank rankled his board colleagues with a May guest column in another agricultural publication that took aim at Ontario’s grain commodity boards for their deference to a hired lobbying firm "run by hard core Liberal Warren Kinsella."

Wrote Vanderspank: "Prior to the last federal election, some of us wanted to demonstrate to get the federal government to support the Risk Management Program. But the Grain and Oilseeds Safety net committee asked us to stand down because they were paying a lot of money to the Daisy Group.... So far, the Daisies got us nothing, which is understandable. Who in their right mind hires a Liberal strategist to lobby a Conservative government?"

The founding member of the Lanark Landowners’ Association did commend Ontario’s commodity boards for carrying out "excellent" crop research and market development. "But when it comes to politics, wrong-headed lobby groups and timid letter writers don’t cut it," he wrote.

In response, the Ontario Wheat Producers removed the outspoken founding member of the Lanark Landowners Association from board committees and cut him from in-camera and discussions of "sensitive" issues — moves protested by members of District 10 who met in Winchester last month.

"We wrote a letter to the board, e-mailed to [Ontario Wheat Producers Chair] David Whaley, and we stated that we stood behind John, that we wanted him re-instated, and that we wanted some answers about why they ousted John," said Glengarry County Wheat Producer president Darrin Laplante.

"We back John 100 per cent because he’s the fellow we elected to represent us."

David Whaley, Chair of the Ontario Wheat Producers, declined to meet with the District 10 group to discuss their concerns over the action against Vanderspank.

At issue is Vanderspank’s penchant for speaking out against the decisions of a board he belongs to.

Whaley explained to The AgriNews that board members must toe the line in public to advance the common interests of wheat farmers. "It’s pretty difficult for a board to function if they can’t come out from behind closed doors united behind their mission," he said.

Though he "respects" Vanderspank for his willingness to confront what he believes is wrong, Grenville County Wheat Producers president Dwight Foster said he understands the need for putting up a united front as well. It’s an approach he personally takes as a local director with the Ontario Soybean Growers, he said.

"You get more with sugar than you do with salt, but sometimes you have to stand for what you believe. I guess I figure I can accomplish more at the table than by ringing the bell."

Foster added it’s a board’s responsibility to "stand together" after emerging from a "fight behind closed doors."

While the sanctions against Vanderspank remain in place - including his ouster from the government relations, research and development and planning committees - the last regular meeting of the Ontario Wheat Producers’ Board, June 16, was "fairly normal" with the District 10 director in attendance, Whaley said.

But Vanderspank disagreed with Whaley’s assessment. "I would say it was pretty much a useless meeting. There were no overtures to try and fix things.... Not one director came up to me to say, let’s see if we can work it out," he said.

Vanderspank has specific issues with a variety of board decisions, which he partly attributes to inherent different interests of spring wheat growers — almost all based in Eastern Ontario and Northern Ontario — and Western Ontario winter wheat producers.

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But Whaley argued that as a board member "your decisions are supposed to benefit everyone." He remarked, "We have no spring wheat in Essex, where I’m from, but my guys don’t yell at me because we support spring wheat research in Eastern Ontario."

As for the involvement of the Daisy Group, Vanderspank continues to question the firm’s hiring by the Ontario-Quebec Grain Farmers Coalition, of which the Ontario Wheat Producers Association is a member.

In a correction to a story running June 11, the Ottawa Sun noted that the Daisy Group was specifically lobbying on behalf of the Coalition, not the Ontario Wheat Producers Association, and that Warren Kinsella — closely affiliated with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff — was not personally doing the lobbying at the federal level.

A chuckling Vanderspank suggested no lobbying was taking place whatsoever.

"To me, it’s patently obvious that nobody’s working on the file," he alleged.

However, Dwight Foster argued the Daisy Group is not hamstrung by Kinsella’s party stripe. The company employs Conservatives who are lobbying the Harper Tories in Ottawa, he said, adding that Scott McFadden, a Conservative, called him to make a presentation at the federal Standing Committee on Agriculture only two weeks earlier.