Canada's galling bribe to climate supervillain Volkswagen

National Post, 21 May 2023

The message from the Canadian government is that crime pays, and extortion works

If you had to choose, among corporate giants, a champion environmental villain of the last 20 years, Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker, would be hard to beat.

It was less than eight years ago when the world learned that, instead of working on making their vehicles less polluting, the very brightest minds in German engineering were conspiring to commit a massive global fraud.

Diesel cars were a key part of Volkswagen’s growth strategy in the early 2000s. Diesel engines release nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that contributes to acid rain. Emissions standards for NOx are strict, so the clever people at Volkswagen came up with a “defeat device” — software that activated pollution controls during government tests. During actual driving, though, the software turned off the controls, permitting emissions some 40 times higher.

Eleven million vehicles, mostly in Europe, were affected; some 128,000 were imported into Canada. Volkswagen had to pay more that $20 billion in fines and compensation in the United States alone. Germany levelled a penalty of $1.5 billion. In Canada, Volkswagen was charged in 2019 with 60 counts of violating the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

Two lower level Volkswagen officials were convicted in the United States. Some of the most senior executives were indicted, but remain in Germany, living luxuriously, as they will not be extradited.

Volkswagen learned well the lessons of the financial crisis in 2008. Fantastically rich financiers could engage in risky and fraudulent behaviour, and when the bills came due, the government would bail them out. The top executives would not face criminal penalties.

Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford welcomed Volkswagen to St. Thomas, Ont., with $14 billion in subsidies for a new electrical vehicle battery “gigafactory.” Nary a word was spoken about how Canadian taxpayers are, in effect, helping to replenish Volkswagen coffers after those heavy fines were levied.

Lazy reporters simply parrot corporate press releases that “giga” — meaning billion, as in “gigabyte” — refers to the size of the factory. No. It refers to the units in which taxpayer cash is shovelled into the accounts of the world’s largest companies. Climate change is, for the rich, a gigabusiness.

Stellantis, another corporate car giant, collected $1 billion in government cash just last year for its new Windsor, Ont., battery plant. Volkswagen got $14 billion for 3,000 jobs at its gigafactory; more than $4.5 million per job.

The Stellantis plant will have 2,500 jobs, so at the same rate, it should have got way more than one lousy gig of government gifts. Indeed, if Stellantis got the Volkswagen rate, it would have come to $11 billion. So now Stellantis has shut down construction in Windsor until it can extort 10 more big gigs, or the greater part thereof.

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