As I said earlier, I acknowledge that the targets in the reports were not fully met, but there has been improvement. The money that has been spent includes some significant increases in certain areas—infrastructure, child and family services, kindergarten to grade 12 education and non-insured health benefits. These programs have grown fairly impressively over the last 10 years, in large part because there's been huge demand. The non-insured health benefits program has grown over 10 years. I'm not sure what the baseline would have been, but today it's at over 983,000. There's a bigger draw on the program.
New programs have come into place. Jordan's principle, which is not a program but an initiative, has had enormous demands—over $2 billion a year, historically—in addressing services for first nations children on and off reserve who are falling through the gaps for certain health and social services. I mentioned children's services earlier in terms of the child welfare bucket, an enormous amount today. We're spending four times the amount, basically. Are we seeing results? Perhaps not as quickly as we'd like, but we are. Although there's still a significant number of first nations children in care, we're seeing that when they are in care, they are far more in the care of kinship, with family, as opposed to other homes. We're starting to see things like that.
For education, we co-developed with first nations a new formula in 2019. It was significantly more rich than the previous formula, which I don't think had been touched for 20 years before that. Meanwhile, that cohort of children has grown and is growing the fastest in Canada, so it's a catch-up, if you will, to what is actually needed. As I said earlier, this education program now is not just about paying the fee for teaching and for teachers; it's also about wraparound supports, language, after-school care, and now, for the first time since 2019, full-day kindergarten.
We've talked a lot about water today. Even there, 10,000 more homes are now connected to water systems because of the investments that have been made, and 670 public buildings now have clean drinking water.
There are results. The money has been well spent. There are all kinds of measures for auditing. All contribution agreements to first nations recipients do need to have audited financial statements. Those are posted, transparently, on the Internet website to ensure that the money goes where it needs to go.
Of course, for everybody in Canada, there have been inflationary pressures since COVID and the pandemic. A lot of money went to indigenous people and first nations on reserve; $600 billion went to all Canadians during the pandemic, similarly. Although inflation has come down today to normal levels, for many years it was at 5%, 4.9% or 7%. You will see that in the expenditures the department has posted.
So there are results, sir, and I would be happy to submit something to show that, but yes, we still need to go a fair way to demonstrate that the money will actually get to the targets put before us in the previous audits.