We have a new CEO at Toronto Pearson. Some of you have had the opportunity to meet with Deborah Flint. She came to us from LAX. Deborah never stops thinking about how we can pivot and innovate towards a better future, and how our industry needs to change.
One thing she wanted to look at and understand better as someone coming into the Canadian airport sector was what some of the underlying frameworks are for our governance model, including some aspects of ground leases at airports. One of the challenges, and I'm sure Ian will speak to this, is the need to return airports such as Pearson back to the government with no debt and in world-class condition. That's a challenge.
Secondly, we have a requirement to pay 12% of our gross revenues to the government in the form of ground rent each year. If I look back to 2019, that was about $170 million. That creates some challenges in terms of our flexibility to be as innovative as we want in new revenue generation opportunities, but that hasn't stopped us from trying to do that.
I'll turn it over to Ian to give you some perspective on how his team, the commercial team and the strategy team are thinking about new approaches to commercial opportunities.