Stop TB Canada Elimination Tracker Updated: Sharpening focus on progress, gaps, and accountability
The tuberculosis (TB) data landscape in Canada is evolving. With the Government of Canada’s recent launch of a national TB dashboard, access to timely surveillance data has significantly improved. This has created an opportunity and a need to better synthesize and contextualize this information.
In response, StopTB Canada has updated its Elimination Tracker to complement this new resource. The tracker focuses onCanada’s overall progress toward TB elimination, key milestone goals, and global commitments.
A clearer view of TB trends in Canada
Yearly surveillance updates are now organized under “TB Surveillance Updates (2024)”, presenting the most recent data across five indicators. These sections offer an overview of yearly changes and emerging trends in TB epidemiology in Canada, helping users quickly understand how TB is evolving across the country
Measuring progress against global and national commitments
The updated tracker strengthens its focus on evaluating Canada’s progress toward both domestic and global TB elimination targets, including those outlined under the World Health Organization (WHO) End TB Strategy and commitments made through the 2023 United Nations High-Level Meeting (UNHLM) on TB. It specifically assesses whether current trends are aligned with the trajectories required to meet these targets.
Uneven progress across provinces and territories
A key addition to the tracker is a deeper focus on regional variation in TB incidence across provinces and territories.The updated tool now shows how quickly TB rates would need to decline in each province and territory for Canada to reach its 2035 pre-elimination target of fewer than 1 case per 100,000 people.
The results reveal widening gaps between required and observed reduction rates. Between 2015 and 2024, most regions have not achieved the rate of decline required - highlighting uneven and, in many cases, insufficient progress across the country.
How does Canada compare internationally?
A new comparative section examines changes in TB incidence from 2015 to 2024 across G7 (Group of 7) and M5 (Migration 5) countries. This analysis highlights that while many peer countries have experienced steady declines, similar progress has not been observed in Canada over the same time period – raising important questions about policy effectiveness and implementation.
A growing gap in TB research funding
The tracker also updates Canada’s contribution to global TB research and development (R&D), using the latest estimates from the UNHLM. With a revised, increased, fair share target of 0.15%, the analysis shows that Canada is falling further behind. The gap between Canada’s contributions and global TB funding targets has widened in recent years, driven in part by declines in overall spending on TB R&D
Tracking progress on new global targets
Finally, the tracker also incorporates updated commitments determined from the 2023 UNHLM on TB, which set revised global targets for 2023 to 2027. Canada-specific targets derived from these global targets are presented alongside reported notifications for TB, drug-resistant TB (DR-TB), and TB in children to assess current progress towards their achievement.