Well, the Alberta government made a political decision in the mid-nineties that we're still paying for. At the time, Premier Ralph Klein and his cabinet decided that in order to develop the oil sands, which at that time was considered somewhat of a marginal resource, we had to sweeten the pot, and so he introduced the famous penny-on-the-dollar royalty, called the generic royalty at the time. It was designed to basically have the public pay for the construction of oil sands projects in the form of forgone royalty until all the capital costs had been paid off.
As I said in my remarks, there's no other industry in Canada that's been given a sweetheart deal like that. But at the time, oil was trading at about $15 a barrel and we were coming out of a recession, so it may have made some sense at that time. But the general outlines of that royalty regime have not been changed even through periods of dramatically increased oil prices. The Parkland Institute, which is affiliated with the University of Alberta, did a study and said that even if the Government of Alberta had hit its own very low targets in terms of royalty collection over the last 10 years, they would have generated $65 billion in extra royalty revenue for the Alberta government.
Contrast that to the situation we've had with the province. We have six years now of deficits which are being used to justify cuts to education, health care, universities, and colleges. By any measure, we're the richest province in the country, but you wouldn't know it by our services. Our politicians say the cupboard is bare, but the reason it's bare is that they made a decision not to collect revenue from the sale of our resources. So the gap is huge, and for some reason, it's taboo in our province for politicians to talk about increasing the royalty, even though it's clear that it's having huge impacts.
Sorry, that was the royalty question. What was the second part of the question?