Thank you for the question. I know this has been of great interest to this committee and others, and I certainly welcome the engagement.
The real measure I think we're all struggling to get is, are we protecting vulnerable children from risk and harm? It's not really easy to find a satisfactory measure of that. Chasing how much we're spending isn't necessarily a good indicator. If you're actually spending more on child protection, that means things are getting worse. And we doubled the spending on the child and family services program over a period of time.
What I think we identified, with the help of the work from the Auditor General, was that we had the incentives all wrong. You actually got more money as an agency if you took kids out of care. And we didn't really have a funding formula that provided a lot of resources for prevention. In many cases, early intervention and prevention with the families in the communities means that the kids can be protected from harm and risk without having to be taken out of the home and put into care. So children in care is sort of a flawed measure as well for what we're trying to get at.
We have fixed the funding formula. We make sure resources are available for prevention services. And we've put in place these kinds of tripartite agreements, because these are creatures of the provincial child protection statutes. In six of the provinces, I think it is, we have $100 million or more in funding over several budgets. They go at the pace at which we can conclude agreements with the provinces--I can certainly provide the list--but we're now covering about 68% of first nations kids with this prevention approach.
We've had a bit of back and forth with the Auditor General about culturally appropriate services, which we discussed earlier. For me, the most important policy part of this is, are we investing in prevention? The more we can invest in prevention, the less you have to invest in remediation.