The best golf courses in Canada
Cabot Links, the original course at Cabot Cape Breton, was a big riser on our World 100 and Best in Canada rankings.
Jacob Sjöman
Canada’s golf courses portray the full spectrum of golf architecture. Historic parkland courses like Toronto Golf Club and St. George’s trace their roots to Golden Age greats, namely Harry Colt and Stanley Thompson, respectively. National Golf Club of Canada, ranked No. 43 in our latest World’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses survey and No. 6 in the country, is a 1970s George Fazio design. The two courses at Cabot Cape Breton, Cabot Cliffs (No. 1 in Canada and No. 14 in the World) and Cabot Links (No. 2 and No. 25), represent the finest in global destination links golf. They’re joined by other 21st century standouts like Memphremagog (No. 7 in Canada) and Bigwin Island (No. 24), to name just two. Internationally ranked Jasper Park (No. 35) and Banff Springs (No. 66), meanwhile, set the North American standard for golf in the Rocky Mountains.
No country besides the U.S. and perhaps New Zealand can match Canada for wild diversity of its landscapes, from the mountains to the central high prairies, to the lake region of Ontario, the rugged Pacific coastline and the links and seaside cliffs of Nova Scotia. That range is reflected not only in the top 30 courses of Canada, listed below, but also in the World ranking that showcases nine Canadian courses overall.
Here's our list of the Best Courses in Canada for 2026-2027.
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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Editor's Note: Our Best Courses in Canada ranking is part of Golf Digest's rollout of the Best Courses in Every Country. Check back over the next few weeks for more of our rankings of the best golf around the world.
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Built by a co-founder of the Canadian chain Tim Hortons, Ron Joyce, Fox Harb’r Resort is an upscale, 1,100-acre property that sits right on the ocean in Nova Scotia, about three hours from Cabot Cape Breton. The resort recently unveiled its new 18-hole layout, two nines labeled the Ocean and Vineyard nines, designed by Doug Carrick and Tom McBroom. The Ocean nine sits on linksland with sweeping coastal views while the Vineyard nine is more heathland style rolling along undulation terrain.
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Le Club Laval Sur-de-lac’s Green course is a classic Willie Park Jr. parkland design through rolling hills about 20 minutes west of Montreal. It’s the shorter, more traditional course that complements the 2013 modern entry at the club, the Blue course, designed by Mike Weir and Ian Andrew. The club’s decision to upgrade the previous Blue course, which had first opened in the 1960s, has firmly put Le Club Laval Sur-de-lac among the best private clubs in Canada.
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One of the most exclusive clubs in Canada, the Avalon Club was conceived by a wealthy Canadian entrepreneur, Gordon Stollery, who wanted his own private course. The Goodwood course was originally laid out by Donald Steel and completed by Martin Ebert, who previously worked for Steel. The glacial moraine property creates one of the most marvelous, rolling pieces of land in Ontario, with generously sized putting surfaces to account for the number of the difficulty of lies one approaches the green from.
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Andy Staples has a restoration plan in the works at Mount Bruno Club, an excellent, underrated Willie Park Jr. parkland design in a quiet neighborhood outside Montreal. Though the course is short by modern standards, the routing moves in all directions. The green contours provide a strategic test off the tee and into the greens, and water and fescue provide a significant challenge.
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On the southern tip of Vancouver Island, Victoria Golf Club claims to be the oldest 18-hole course in Canada that sits in its current location. The club was founded in 1893 while the current course was finalized in the mid-1920s after work done by A.V. Macan, one of the more underappreciated architects of his time, having done most of his work in the Pacific Northwest, but most notably California Golf Club before Alister MacKenzie rebunkered the course.
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In a country filled with historical classic designs, Scarboro Golf and Country Club deserves to be near the top of that list, boasting the only A.W. Tillinghast design outside the United States. Scarboro underwent significant renovations in 1924 to its existing layout by Tillinghast, right after he had completed work at Baltusrol and Winged Foot. The club has hosted four Canadian Opens, the last of which occurred in 1963.
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When London Hunt Club moved from its central location in the southern Ontario town of the same name in the late 1950s to a new 275-acre location five miles west, it did what clubs across the U.S. and Canada were doing: it hired Robert Trent Jones to build 27 new holes. The championship 18 opened in 1962 and has been the site of numerous prestigious Canadian tournaments through the years. Rees Jones renovated the course in 2000, and in 2022 and 2023, Ohio-based architects and father-son team of Michael and Chris Hurdzan completed another major remodel, the thrust of which was to improve drainage and replace aging bunkers, which were strategically shifted and moved in the process. Fairways were modestly widened and altered, and new turf went down throughout. Always a scenic, isolated property with several of Trent Jones’ water features and holes that run aside the appropriately named Thames River, London Hunt now has the course conditions and infrastructure to improve its current position of no. 22 in the Best in Canada ranking.
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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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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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Originally founded by the Canadian Pacific Railway, Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club was founded in 1911 as Shaughnessy Heights Golf Club, hosting exhibitions for celebrated golfers such as Bobby Jones and Babe Didrikson Zaharias, then moved sites in the 1960s and settled on its current name. A.V. Macan designed the current course with redesigns and tweaks by Geoffrey Cornish. The club has hosted four men’s Canadian Opens, the most recent coming in 2011, as well as the women’s Canadian Open in 2023, won by Meghan Khang.
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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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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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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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Capilano is definitely Old School updated to modern times. The holes of this Stanley Thompson design, now nearly 90 years old, are terraced in pairs into the mountainside, and the enormous Douglas fir, hemlock and cedar that line them give 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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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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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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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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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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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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Jacob Sjöman
The older sister to No. 14 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 Keith Cutten, on a coastal coal transport 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 45th), 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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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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