Lawsuits, scandal and conspiracy theories: The political past of Haldimand’s ward 5 candidates

As Rob Shirton seeks to win a third straight election in Haldimand's Ward 5, a familiar face is trying to defeat him.

The real-estate agent is being challenged by James Kaspersetz, a farmer, retired environmental consultant and, like Shirton, a former member of a controversy-plagued conservation authority in Niagara.

From 2014 to 2018, the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority - which includes lands in both Hamilton and Haldimand - found itself mired in labyrinth of political scandals, lawsuits and investigations.

Kaspersetz, whose career as a City of Hamilton appointee at the agency came to an end in 2019 after being censured over an anti-Muslim Facebook post, was at the centre of much of it as the NPCA's vice-chair and acting chair.

Shirton had less visible public profile on the NPCA, but as a board member cast votes alongside Kaspersetz in favour of decisions that pushed the agency into ever deeper waters. Those decisions resulted in an Ontario auditor general's audit that found an organization rife with significant issues," including serious leadership problems.

Neither man would answer questions from The Spectator about their roles at the beleaguered agency, saying they wanted to focus on the issues of today.

I remain focused on serving my community and have no interest in being distracted by issues that aren't presenting at the doors or in stakeholders meetings," Kaspersetz said in an emailed statement.

Shirton wrote in an email that he was too busy to answer questions, but said that, in retrospect, the problems at the NPCA were the result of bad advice.

With the benefit of hindsight there were clearly board decisions based on a set of recommendations brought before it that contributed to the issues you described," Shirton wrote. My focus and efforts in the intervening time frame have been to work with the board and staff to address the auditor general's findings and put in place the necessary measures to move the organization forward positively."

The third candidate in the three-person ward race is Sheldon Simpson. He has never held public office, but the firefighter and former Ontario Party candidate for Haldimand-Norfolk has his own checkered political history.

Running on the Ontario Party's anti-vaccine mandate platform, he made allegations of election interference and false claims that the federal government was hacking the phones of millions of Canadians to track their whereabouts.

Simpson said he was willing to answer questions from The Spectator, but did not make himself available for an interview.

The trio of candidates have not faced much scrutiny over their political pasts as they run for a seat on Haldimand's municipal council.

Kaspersetz's history is the most public - at least in Niagara where the most of the NPCA territory and politics are located - because of his senior leadership role.

During that time, Ontario's auditor general flagged the NPCA's hiring of senior staff as unfair and opaque, and the board engaged in political campaign to oust a Beamsville board member over false accusations of corruption.

After the 2018 municipal elections, most of the troubled board refused to step aside after many of its elected members were defeated at the ballot box, including chair and then Niagara regional councillor Sandy Annunziata.

It ultimately took a court order to force the old board to stand down and allow the newly appointed one to take its place.

In its final act, the board, including Shirton, voted to transfer all of its authority to Annunziata and Kaspersetz, who in turn triggered another hiring affair by appointing a recently fired senior staffer as their chief administrative officer. Kaspersetz, as the acting chair at the time, signed off on the deal.

The incident resulted in a multimillion lawsuit that was settled in 2020.

Shirton was reappointed to the NPCA by Haldimand's municipal council in 2019, but Kaspersetz's tenure ended after an anti-Muslim Facebook post that was denounced as racist and saw him censured by the newly installed NPCA board - and criticized by Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger.

An interview request from The Spectator was answered with a letter from Kaspersetz's lawyer, advising the newspaper they would be monitoring any stories about him.

The letter said Kaspersetz attempted to report the anti-Muslim post to Facebook in 2019, but accidentally shared it on his profile instead.

Meanwhile, Simpson, who in a recent campaign video said he always marched to the beat of my own drum," has abandoned incendiary rhetoric of the Ontario Party he used in June's provincial election.

During that election, Simpson appeared on a far-right Christian podcast and said the federal government was a tyranny that hacked 30 million phones to track us" during the pandemic.

The federal government did not hack millions of phones. Anonymous location data provided by service providers was sometimes used by public health authorities to see how Canadians were moving about to understand the spread of the novel coronavirus during early months of the pandemic.

He also accused Twitter of election interference" after it suspended the Twitter account of Ontario Party leader Derek Sloan for tweets containing vaccine disinformation. The party did not win any seats in the provincial election.

Grant LaFleche is an investigative reporter with The Spectator. Reach him via email: glafleche@torstar.ca