Imagine this: an American and a Canadian are in a room with billions of dollars free for the taking. The American can’t believe her luck, helps herself to some money, and shares it fairly with the American public. But the Canadian, wanting to make sure the money is actually just sitting there, does nothing — leaving the Canadian public penniless.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between America’s and Canada’s government when it comes to taking action against Volkswagen for its emissions cheating. The U.S. has been swift enough to secure billions of dollars in fines from the company, as criminal and civil penalties for breaking environmental law. But our federal Environment Ministry has done nothing.

It has been more than two years since news broke of Volkswagen cheating and then lying about the pollution caused by its diesel cars. Volkswagen equipped these vehicles with a secret software “defeat device” that switches between “clean” mode during pollution testing, and “dirty” mode when driving in the real world. This illegal hack caused Volkswagen’s cars to spew as much as 35 times the lawful amount of toxic substances, such as nitrogen oxides — known to increase asthma attacks, hospital admissions, and deaths, particularly among young children — into the air.

Once they discovered the defeat device, American law enforcement pounced. They laid criminal and civil charges so extensively that they could have squashed the company. Rather than risk death, Volkswagen cried uncle, pleaded guilty, and voluntarily paid $14.7 billion US in legal settlements — several billion of which went toward cleaning up the environment and building green infrastructure.

In other words, faced with a massive, credible legal risk, Volkswagen confessed and paid up — at least in the U.S.

You might think that a bonanza of billions of dollars, from a company that’s willing to pay, would interest Environment Canada in enforcing the law in Canada. But you would be wrong: Environment Canada has never laid charges against Volkswagen. That continues to be true even though the company’s guilty plea in the U.S. contains a clause that forbids Volkswagen contradicting and walking back from its confessions, anytime or anywhere — including in a courtroom in Canada.

In other words, Volkswagen’s admission of guilt in the U.S. is locked in; recanting it is not an option. That makes subsequent prosecutions in Canada very easy.

Happily, the Province of Ontario gets this. On Sept. 15, the province charged Volkswagen for violating provincial pollution laws, and soon after sent dozens of officers to raid Volkswagen Canada’s headquarters. That’s good for Ontario, which will almost certainly succeed in prosecuting Volkswagen. But it is an embarrassment for Canada’s government, which did not co-ordinate with Ontario to enforce Canada’s laws as well.

If Environment Canada were serious about prosecuting Volkswagen, the financial implications are huge. Volkswagen imported more than 105,000 cars with the illegal “defeat device” into Canada, and each car represents a separate criminal act. Multiplied by the minimum $1 million penalty per act under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, that works out to a possible fine of $105 billion! It’s a pretty safe bet that if Canada’s government laid those charges, Volkswagen would beat a path to the negotiating table and volunteer to pay a few billion to settle the matter. That beats the alternative of a criminal trial, which could end with a fine so large as to destroy the company, which nobody wants.

So why hasn’t Environment Canada tried to do this? We’ve never received a convincing answer. Officials say that Canada can’t prosecute a German company like Volkswagen, but that is nonsense: the U.S. did it, and Ontario is doing it. Besides, there’s that guilty plea. If the staff can’t figure out how to prosecute a company that’s confessed its guilt, then what can they prosecute?

All Canadians are losing out over this inaction. The current government came to power promising to be on the side of the law, protecting the environment, being fiscally responsible, backing Canada’s auto builders and unions, and building green infrastructure. If that’s really true, and we hope it is, then the government needs to enforce the Canadian Environmental Protection Act; needs to punish polluters; needs to pick billions of dollars of low-hanging fruit; needs to stop Volkswagen competing against Canada’s carmakers by cheating; and needs to look on this event as an opportunity for our future.

Look at America: it cornered Volkswagen, and is better for it. For example, there’s the $2 billion US that Volkswagen is paying to build electric car charging stations across the U.S. — an investment in green infrastructure that will serve the American environment and American people for decades to come, without costing the taxpayer a penny.

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Would Minister McKenna, or anyone else in the Trudeau government, please explain why that is a bad outcome and why Canada can’t do the same? If not, then hurry up please, and prosecute Volkswagen. It’s overdue, and the excuses aren’t persuasive.

Amir Attaran is a lawyer with Ecojustice’s law clinic at the University of Ottawa, Tim Gray is executive director with Environmental Defence and Kim Perrotta is executive director with Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE).