Best in Every Country
The best golf courses in Canada
Memphrémagog, an hour east of Montreal, is the top-ranked course in Quebec.
Courtesy of the club
The spotlight is on Canadian golf this week for the Presidents Cup. Royal Montreal Golf Club, perhaps the oldest club in North America, moved to its current location in Ile Bizard, four miles west of Montreal, in 1959, and hired Dick Wilson to design its Blue and Red courses. Royal Montreal has been a regular host on the international stage for the Presidents Cup and the Canadian Open, but when it comes to the best Canadian golf courses, there are more courses worth exploring.
Golf Digest's ranking of the 30 best courses in Canada was determined by Golf Digest's 100 Greatest panelists, which consists of our 1,900 well-traveled amateur golfers across the United States and Canada—across 10 years worth of data. Golf Digest's panelists score courses on the following criteria: Shot Options, Challenge, Layout Variety, Aesthetics, Conditioning and Character. Our new ranking will be released next spring, so we'll see if Royal Montreal moves up after the spotlight this year. (Note: This ranking was published in 2022.)
We urge you to click through to each individual course page for bonus photography, drone footage and expanded reviews. Plus, you can now leave your own ratings on the courses you’ve played … to make your case why your favorite should be ranked higher.
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John and Jeannine Henebry
Another sensational Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw design, Cabot Cliffs overflows with variety with its southernmost holes in Lahinch-like sand dunes, its northernmost atop Pebble Beach-type ocean cliffs and bits of pine-lined Scottish Highlands in between. The course has six par 5s, including three in the space of four holes, and six par 3s, plus an additional one-shot bye-hole aside the fourth. Sporting the same fescue turf mix as nearby sister course Cabot Links (ranked 25th), some tee shots seem to roll forever, but so do errant shots that miss greens. The cliff-edged par-3 16th has become one of the game's most photographed holes.
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The Preferred Lie
George Fazio once lost a U.S. Open in a playoff to Ben Hogan and his architecture reflected the sort of discipline needed to win that championship: tight well-guarded fairways, big, well-bunkered, fast-paced greens and polished conditions. National G.C. of Canada reflects that and more, with gambling water hazards and double doglegs. In 2005, Tom Fazio, who helped his uncle with the original 1974 design, rebunkered some holes and created a new par-4 16th.
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Courtesy of the club
Another outstanding Stanley Thompson design, St. George's is routed through forest-covered glacial land, with meandering fairways that diagonally traverse valleys to greens perched on domes. The putting surfaces are tightly bunkered and full of hidden undulations. These are considered some of Thompson's best bunkering, thanks in part to American architect Tom Doak and Canadian architect Ian Andrew, who recently collaborated to restore their shapes, highlighting their sweeping lines and graceful movements. St. George’s hosted the Canadian Open six times, including the 2022 event won flamboyantly by Rory McIlroy.
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Courtesy of the club
Capilano is definitely Old School updated to modern times. The Stanley Thompson design, with its holes terraced in pairs into the mountainside. Wow nearly 90 years old, the fairways are lined by enormous Douglas fir, hemlock and cedar, all giving the mistaken impression that the corridors are narrow. Thompson’s bunkering is spectacular and prolific. In recent years, Doug Carrick has rebuilt three greens and expanded others to accommodate desired green speeds of 10 to 11 on a Stimpmeter. From the elevated first tee, the city of Vancouver, five miles south, is visible, and the last six holes provide outstanding views of the Coastal Range, particularly Hollyburn Mountain.
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Jasper Park actually lies farther north than Stanley Thompson's other Alberta masterpiece, No. 60 Banff Springs, and is a perfect complement to it. The routing has holes lined up with every prominent mountain peak in the distance. Thompson's typical sprawling bunkers are everywhere, some staggered diagonally across lines of play, others on the margins of a hole, poking out from beneath tree lines. Built in 1925 by the hand labor of some 200 men, holes are carved through fir, aspen and silver birch trees, and rocks were piled and covered with earth to create greens like the one on the short par-3 15th, a shot so precarious it's like hitting to the back of a slumbering sea lion.
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Evan Schiller
The older sister to No. 13 Cabot Cliffs is not a natural links, though it looks and plays like it. Cabot Links was man-made by designer-shaper Rod Whitman, with help from Dave Axland and Jeff Mingay, on a coastal coal mine staging area that serviced mines beneath the sea. Bump-and-run shots on firm fescue turf is the game on this understated layout, with muted dunes, austere bunkering and gentle, generous greens. Call it Canada's Portmarnock (ranked 37th), though Ireland has no match for Cabot's postcard par-4 sixth, a dogleg-left around a tidal yacht basin. In early routings, that was going to be the closing hole.
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Courtesy of the club
Memphrémagog in southern Quebec, an hour east of Montreal, is perhaps the toughest ticket in Canadian golf. The ultra-exclusive club is believed to have around just 50 ultrawealthy members and outside play is extremely rare. It’s a shame more golfers don’t get a taste of it—Magog, as it’s known, is a big, lovely course with holes carved into the slopes of the Green Mountains above a lake of the same name. Tom McBroom’s architectural artistry is on full display with high, panoramic tee shots, holes that get down in the lows close to streams and ponds, and intricately shaped bunkering offset by southern Quebec’s lush green hues. But ultimately, it’s the difficult, enormously contoured putting surfaces that leave the biggest impression.
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Stephen Szurlej
There aren’t many places in Canada as ruggedly beautiful as Tobiano, perched on benchland next to Kamloops Lake. The holes work an Ocean Course at Kiawah kind of routing, with each nine moving outward in opposite directions on inland ground before turning and coming back above the water. The wide-open property is a labyrinth of dry ravines and rocky arroyos, and the design keeps mostly to the high ground along the tops of the narrow ridges, plunging between them only occasionally (the fifth feels like Lahinch playing between dunes). But the severed topography also means there are forced carries galore and many will find it difficult to finish holes like the par 3 seventh with a green placed on an outcropping that falls away on all sides. Still, for the public player’s money, there’s more visceral excitement at Tobiano than almost anywhere else on the continent.
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A fascinating H.S. Colt layout, with holes routed in clusters of triangles, traversing the hilly landscape both face-on and diagonally, with meandering creeks winding across fairway landing areas. Tom Clark, who spent 20-plus years as consulting architect, rebuilt greens and did work to further emphasize the land contours. More recently, Englishman Martin Ebert was brought in to re-establish Colt's design philosophy from original drawings, though he had to monitor the shaping work via remote technology due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Hamilton has hosted the Canadian Open seven times, including five since 2003, most recently the 2024 event won by Scot Robert MacIntyre.
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Photo by Stephen Szurlej
Chiseled out of long striations of rock interspersed with low wetlands in between, the Muskoka Bay site 100 miles north of Toronto was anything but golf friendly. In the hands of Canadian architectural impresario Doug Carrick, however, who never met a site he couldn’t wrangle, those ingredients plus dense surrounding forests were hammered into a magical flowing playground of adventurous, one-of-a-kind golf holes. Opened in 2007 with an assist from designer Ian Andrew, Muskoka Bay resembles the architecture of Mike Strantz with turbulent fairways that writhe and contract, heroic shots over outcroppings and water and slithering greens that send approaches and balls in unpredictable and sometime unwanted directions. Substitute the dazzling rock formations that Carrick used to such profound visual effect with grassy dunes and you have a Canadian doppelganger of Tobacco Road.
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Where No. 77 Old Head in Ireland plays along the top of escarpments, Banff in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta lies beneath escarpments, with near-vertical cliffs of Mount Rundle towering 3,000 feet over almost every fairway. The course, another masterful design by Canadian Stanley Thompson, is tucked into the narrow Y-shaped valley formed by the Bow and Spray Rivers. Bunkering at Banff may be the best of Thompson's career. There are 150 of them, often in circular clusters, with ebbs and flows in their shapes that mirror mountain peaks.
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Courtesy of Highlands Links/Chris Gallow
On the opposite Nova Scotia coast from Cabot Cliffs and Cabot Links is the 80-year-old Highlands Links in Cape Breton, a sterling Stanley Thompson design routed to give golfers the full coastal experience, from ocean beach, to deep forest, to river’s edge and back. Thompson even shaped greenside mounds to mimic certain mountain ridges in the distance. A national park operation, Highlands had long been criticized for spotty maintenance, but after a 2010 flood, serious efforts, directed by Canadian golf architect Ian Andrew, were undertaken to restore its luster and improve its turf quality.
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Stephen Denton
Though founded in 1873 and purported to be the oldest in North America, the club has only been playing its current courses, the Blue and Red, since 1959 when it moved from a location in historic Montreal to Ile Bizard four miles west. Dick Wilson built both courses on what was mostly farmland and apple orchards, stuffing the Blue full of doglegs and deep greens requiring precision aerial approaches. Rees Jones, who remembers walking the property as a boy when his father, Robert Trent Jones, interviewed for the job, remodeled the course in 2004 and 2005, though he was respectful of Wilson’s tenets of mid-century architecture (only the 12th and 13th holes were fundamentally altered). Jones and design associate Bryce Swanson have been back to make minor tweaks, but success at the Blue will still come down to how the players navigate the formidable closing stretch where water lurks on the final five holes.
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