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Canada's official cancer projections for 2026: 254,100 new cancers and 87,900 cancer deaths, with age-standardised incidence and mortality rates still falling but numbers rising as the population grows and ages.
The Canadian Cancer Statistics Advisory Committee, with the Canadian Cancer Society, Statistics Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada, estimated cases, deaths and age-standardised incidence and mortality rates for 2026, standardised to the 2021 Canadian population, by sex and province or territory, using the Canadian Cancer Registry and the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database and the canproj projection package.
The abstract reports 254,100 new cancers and 87,900 cancer deaths, an age-standardised incidence rate of 591.4 and mortality rate of 200.0 per 100,000, both projected to decrease, and lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer making up 47 per cent of new cases. Incidence is 16 per cent higher in males than females (642.2 against 553.9) and mortality 36 per cent higher (235.8 against 172.8). The accompanying release adds that lung cancer remains first for cases (32,900) and deaths, that more females than males are projected to be diagnosed with lung cancer, and that pancreatic cancer is projected to be the third leading cause of cancer death.
These are the numbers Canadian cancer services plan with. They are projections from registry data several years old, not counts, and Quebec's part of them rests on older data than the other provinces', so they describe the direction of travel better than the exact size.
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