“We are tourists. We just want to take some pictures,” said Rinaani, phone at arm’s length, scanning rows of vegetables that never should have been grown.
“We know who you are,” one of the roughnecks replied while she backtracked.
Reconnaissance Energy Africa Ltd. (“ReconAfrica”), a Canadian company, was growing crops on top of the waste pit at Kawe, a tiny village in remote northern Namibia. This is a process the oil industry refers to as “landfarming.” The company has never disclosed the composition of the liquids which it disposed of in the unlined pits and we were trying to find out, but right then, it was time for us to get out of there.
“They don’t know who we are,” Rinaani said after we had climbed back in the running bakkie (pickup truck), with a lot more confidence than I felt was warranted. We were on our second trip to the company’s drill sites. Rinaani was a trustee of the Economic and Social Justice Trust of Namibia, and we were working with the group that was campaigning against the Canadian oil company campaign.
ReconAfrica’s drill pits were already famous for all the wrong reasons, posing a threat to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and they were not lined with a plastic liner. South African Geologist Jan Arkert called the contents “a cocktail of toxic liquid waste, fit only for disposal in a hazardous landfill site.”
Arkert made the remark in direct response to ReconAfrica’s then-CEO Scot Evans, who had made the claim at a Zoom conference: “We are going to have a little experiment when we are done with the local [agriculture] people to introduce fertilizers to the community.” Arkert called this “bizarre”.
From Nova Scotia to Namibia
I am a constituent in the riding of South Shore-St. Margaret’s. I grew up in Nova Scotia, but in 2007, after writing the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), I decided to run away to southern Africa instead of pursuing that law career.
I had lived in Namibia for almost two decades by the time ReconAfrica arrived under a cloud of controversy. In 2020, Namibians began tagging me on Facebook, saying, “Hey Rob Parker, these are your people.”
While I could not disagree more, the company was Canadian, and the record showed it was clearly misleading Namibians about their intentions. I had a background in activism. I knew what to do. It meant breaking a rule that had served me well: don’t antagonize the Namibian government.
I began organizing with the grassroots campaign against the Canadian company that was already running in Namibia. I wrote an editorial in Namibia’s largest daily paper titled “Canada, come get your people” in Jan. 2021, and have continued since then.
Meet the Frackers
ReconAfrica is a Calgary junior oil and gas company listed on the TSX-V and exploring in northern Namibia. It is the operator of Petroleum Exploration Licence 73, spanning approximately 6.3 million acres in northeastern Namibia. The licence sits in the watershed of the Okavango Delta, a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Ramsar wetland of international importance.
Drilling began in 2021 and continues. On Dec. 3, 2025, the company announced its Kavango West 1X well encountered 64 net metres of hydrocarbon pay, and would conduct a production test in 2026.
ReconAfrica originally marketed the exploration to investors as an unconventional shale play, and ran investor slides referencing “modern frac stimulations” and “production from horizontals.” In paid promotional content for ReconAfrica, labelled an “advertisement” by the publisher of oilprice.com, which disclosed that it owned shares in the company, the head of drilling, Nick Steinsberger, was promoted as the “Father of Fracking,” brought in because “the man who invented ‘slick-water fracking’ is ready to drill the Kavango Basin.”
Originally Published in the Halifax Examiner https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/commentary/canada-come-get-your-people-namibian-communities-reported-abuses-to-the-human-rights-watchdog-canada-built-two-years-later-the-complaint-is-still-unanswered-and-the-office-is-gon/
When Namibians began raising the alarm about fracking in this water-scarce region, the country’s Ministry of Mines and Energy put out a press release emphasizing that no fracking would be permitted on Namibian soil.
Then something strange happened. The company deleted all references to fracking from its website, including its own resource reports. ReconAfrica said the exploration was now for conventional oil, but kept using its previous hydrocarbon estimates.
Founder Craig Steinke told Energy Voice in 2020 that “local journalists” had fabricated the fracking mentions despite the clear factual record.
Canadian civil society groups reported the company’s violation to the B.C. Securities Commission. The Commission later said it was not investigating because it is not a regulator.
Organic drilling fluid and other long stories
ReconAfrica drilled the first well without first doing seismic testing. The company told amiable Canadian officials that this was protocol. ReconAfrica stuck a finger in the air, but against all odds, said it made a discovery. Subsequent investor lawsuits show that plaintiffs accused the company of making a series of false and misleading statements implying that it had discovered oil. The share price went to the moon and then, according to Viceroy Research, insiders dumped their shares on “unsophisticated retail investors”, which Rolling Stone said netted the insiders tens of millions of dollars.
Yet, despite the windfall, the company refused to line its drill pits. In Oct. 2020, before drilling operations began, ReconAfrica’s spokesperson Claire Preece, told National Geographic that “potentially toxic drill cuttings from the oil test wells ‘will be managed in lined pits, cleaned, and disposed of offsite as per company and regulatory requirements.’” However, when National Geographic reporters took pictures of an unlined mud pit, the company began claiming its drilling fluids were “100% organic and biodegradable,” and that it intended to donate the untested wastewater to small farmers to use on their crops.
A Namibian parliamentary investigation into ReconAfrica said it was drilling illegally and without permits.
The dog that could not bark
Access to Information Requests (ATIPs) show that Canadian officials said that there was no reason to suspect human rights violations, despite a volume of media reports showing this was not true. The ATIPs show the Canadian embassy then cooperated with the company on a response to the United Nations (UN) which contained multiple falsehoods and misleading statements.
Even after Global Affairs Canada officials were contacted by the RCMP who were investigating ReconAfrica, Global Affairs continued to provide trade services to the firm. The RCMP Special Investigations Unit flew to Nova Scotia to meet with me in 2022. This was reported in two separate stories by the Globe and Mail who said the company was investigated for alleged offences under Canada’s foreign-bribery law.
Canada’s representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Bob Rae, met with the company, despite its treatment of Namibians. Rae’s former staffer, turned lobbyist Will Adams, worked the Global Affairs bureaucrats on behalf of the company, according to the National Observer.
We were told that Canada was opening a new office, created to address human rights violations by companies like ReconAfrica. That was the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) created in 2019 by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, which announced a “robust” office armed with powers needed to investigate, i.e. to compel witnesses and documents.
By the time the office opened these powers had disappeared.
Without these powers, the CORE could offer only “dialogue.” Useful to a company trying to appear open-minded, useless to people on the receiving end.
We discussed our options, whether it was worthwhile filing a complaint with the CORE. Our first instinct was to refuse. We wrote to Canada’s High Commissioner and refused to enter a process that had no mechanism to do anything at all.
Empty office invites complaints
Then in 2024, we were approached by the University of Toronto’s International Human Rights Program, which asked if we would be interested in making a complaint to the CORE. After much consultation we decided that, despite the risks, we would go ahead. We believed that if the CORE produced a damaging report on the company it could be useful. The facts were so damning and obvious, we didn’t think any other outcome was possible.
On April 9, 2024, the International Human Rights Program (IHRP) at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law filed a 187-page complaint with the CORE, on behalf of affected Kavango communities and Saving Okavango’s Unique Life. The complaint rests on sworn community affidavits gathered by the IHRP’s legal team, who went to Namibia. Testimonies make clear that people put their safety at risk to complain. Many asked their identities be withheld for this reason.
The CORE was created to review complaints about human rights abuses, including harm to the rights to water, food, health, and a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, by Canadian extractive companies operating abroad. Its own operating procedures commit it to an intake decision within 30 working days.
More than two years after the Kavango communities and Saving Okavango’s Unique Life complaint was filed, the CORE had still given no intake decision.
The first and only permanent ombudsperson left the CORE on April 30, 2024. The interim ombudsperson left May 20, 2025. The position has been empty since.
A middle finger to the UN
When the CORE office met with the IHRP and myself, they warned us against speaking to the media while the office adjudicated our complaint. We refused to give up our right to free speech to please the office.
Most bizarre of all is that the office seems to have kept on accepting complaints that it knew it could not assess, right up until the moment it closed. Days after the office closed, on Sunday, June 14, 2026, I called Canada’s CORE office to see what message someone abused by a Canadian company would hear. “To tell us about a problem with a Canadian company, press 1,” was the answer. The disembodied voice failed to inform callers that they were pissing in the wind.
In 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Committee told Canada to create an independent mechanism with the power to investigate human rights abuses by Canadian companies abroad. On March 23, 2026, the same Committee told Canada to appoint a new Ombudsperson urgently and to give the office independence and resources. Mark Carney’s recent announcement that his government is eliminating the CORE is a defiant middle finger to the UN.
Stuck in limbo
The CORE ombuds was supposed to let us know within 30 days if our complaint was accepted. Over two years later, we were still waiting.
I began calling my Member of Parliament, Liberal Jessica Fancy, almost a year ago, wanting to know what had happened to our complaint, and asking her to follow up on what was going on with the ombudsperson-less CORE.
In the 2025 federal election, Fancy campaigned as “a fierce advocate for rural Nova Scotians” whose “action speaks louder than slogans.” I had little reason to suspect that she would be so unwilling to ask Canada’s human rights ombudsperson to abide by best business practices. Canadian officials frequently travel to Africa to lecture locals on good governance.
After explaining the issue, in detail, to several of Fancy’s staffers on the phone, I expected some response.
No help from MP Jessica Fancy
In a May 21, 2026 email, Fancy’s office told Rinaani and me that the CORE leadership was vacant because, “Appointments of this nature require careful consideration to ensure that the selected individual possesses the experience, judgment, and expertise necessary to effectively fulfill the responsibilities of the office.”
People risked their safety to complain to the CORE office, but are given preposterous excuses. Do they think Namibians don’t operate businesses or have a government? We are being asked to believe that the Canadian government cannot fill a vacancy.
We only found out the office was closing in a CBC story, despite having spent a year asking my MP Jessica Fancy to help us. I had eventually resorted to attending her public meetings to try and get a reply. She took no notes and asked no questions.
Despite her pledge to reach out to Justice Minister Sean Fraser and Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu at that meeting, I never heard from Fancy directly again. We agreed I would follow up in two weeks, but, over a month later, I was told by a staffer that the MP was “monitoring the situation.”
Since then Fancy has announced no public appearances. After one constituent asked this “champion” to advocate for victims of the Canadian mining industry, her community engagements, branded as “Java with Jess” that promised “more to come,” appear to have been shelved.
It was then that I decided to buy the web domain jessicafancy.com and tell the story of how my MP was asked to use her voice for victims, but slow-walked us until the office closed instead.
Two days after Carney announced he was closing the human rights watchdog, Jessica Fancy’s BlueSky post shows she was using question period to advocate expanding the sector which we asked her to regulate. “Canada’s mining sector is digging up opportunity” Fancy boasted.
I asked my MP for a year to help locate our stalled complaint about ReconAfrica to the CORE, and she feigned helplessness while communities suffered, but proudly deployed her toolbox when it came to pleasing the industry.
Captured Canadian officials
When Mark Carney announced that the CORE was closing, he said that the government tried to properly regulate Canadian companies and it didn’t work. It didn’t work because without the power to compel witnesses and documents, the CORE was designed to fail: A detective who must beg the accused to supply him with the murder weapon.
The Liberals sold out victims of terrible, heinous crimes and called it feminism. In her 2017 foreword to the Feminist International Assistance Policy, then-Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland called it “historic” that the Canadian government would “proclaim themselves as feminists.”
These feminists had to decide between an office that could investigate Gang Rape in Latin America and Forced Labour and Slavery in Africa, versus the TSX. The new Liberal Party leader, whose campaign commercials invoked Mr. Dressup, chose the latter a year into his term as prime minister.
Between Jan. 2018 and April 2019, the Mining Association of Canada and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) recorded 530 lobbying communications with federal officials, according to the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project.
As part of the Standing Committee on International Trade’s report tabled Sept. 18, 2023, Global Affairs Canada was tasked with reviewing the CORE. The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), “as a key stakeholder since the inception of CORE, was invited to provide input on the office’s process and efficiency.” In other words, the Liberal government asked the mining industry what it wanted to happen to human rights victims, and now the CORE is being disappeared.
In their rush to remove any remedy for victims of abuses by Canadian mining companies overseas, the corrupt Liberal Party left at least 36 cases, including ours about ReconAfrica in Namibia, in permanent limbo.
Sorry…sorry…that was impolite. Captured. Canadian politicians are captured by the mining industry.
We would only call them corrupt if they were African.
Rob Parker is a researcher, writer and activist .
The Data Room 
Leave a comment