VW sold Canada 'clean diesel' — the settlement was $2.1 billion

For years, Volkswagen and Audi promoted their 2.0-litre diesel vehicles in Canada as cleaner than comparable gasoline cars — 'clean diesel' was the selling proposition. The cars carried software that recognized emissions testing and cheated it; on the road they emitted far more than the law allowed. The Bureau concluded the environmental marketing claims were false or misleading: the cars were advertised as cleaner than equivalent gasoline engines when the advertising was built on rigged results.

The consent agreement announced 19 December 2016 combined a class-action settlement — buyback and restitution payments totalling up to $2.1 billion, one of the largest consumer settlements in Canadian history — with a $15 million penalty for the misleading claims themselves. A second round followed in 2018 for 3.0-litre vehicles, adding up to $290.5 million.

The Bureau's case treated the advertising as its own wrong, separate from the emissions fraud it advertised: the cheat device was the engineering failure, but the clean-diesel campaign was what Canadians bought. Every claim built on a rigged test is a claim the advertiser knows to be false before the ad runs.