David Eby’s minister went to Fort St. John on June 29 and sold $2.4 billion more in gas royalties. Adrian Dix said it on tape, behind closed doors, to Treaty 8. He said the number came from Budget 2026. That number was never real. The budget booked royalties off a plant-inlet price that skipped the costs every monthly invoice actually uses: transport and processing. Nancy Olewiler at SFU, the economist who wrote the last royalty review, puts the miss at about $500 million a year. That is not a rounding error. That is the line Dix was selling. Treaty 8 chiefs did not wait for a newspaper. On July 14 they walked a letter into the premier’s office. They named the error. They said the government “appears to have fundamentally misled” its citizens and its creditors. They said Victoria was stacking mistake on mistake, and that the new royalty framework coming January 1 would capture 11 to 14 percent of profits against the 50 percent target this government once advertised. David Eby had that letter for six weeks. On August 25 a reporter put it to him in Vancouver. His answer: “I’m not familiar with any error in our budget related to oil and gas revenues.” He sent it to Dix. He sent it to Finance. When they showed him the letter he had already received, he called it a “vigorous back and forth.” Two days later his own office admitted it. An “administrative error.” Their number: $292 million a year, about $1.5 billion over five years. They blamed “unit and currency conversions.” Olewiler called that explanation incomplete and confusing. She said $292 million is the low bound of what she has seen. Either figure is a hole in the books. Neither one was in the speech Dix gave in Fort St. John. I asked this government what performance they were paying themselves $23 million for. Executive raises. Political staff. Authorized in February, backdated to July 1, 2025, the same year they booked a $7.7 billion deficit, cut programs, and told the public service jobs were going. Shannon Salter made $434,073. I asked CHEK what improved. Faster health care? A better budget? Finance had no answer. Now we know the royalty line was fat. Households got a 40-cent wage bump on June 1. The people who booked the fiction still got the raise. They say they will fix it in the September update. That is Q1. It is not in the books today. The House does not sit until October 5. The fall story they want to tell is still Ottawa, not this. So the question is not complicated. Was the $2.4 billion ever real?