GBR Friday | The Economics Of The RBC Canadian Open — And Of The Most Underrated Golf Market In The World
Record participation, a federation that builds assets, and golf's smartest answer to winter: what Caledon tells us about the club of 2030
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Dear GBR family,
This week, the centre of gravity of the golf business is not in Florida, not in Surrey, not in the Gulf. It is in Caledon, Ontario — a town of 80,000 people, forty-five minutes from Toronto Pearson — where the 115th RBC Canadian Open is being played at TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley. Only The Open Championship and the U.S. Open have been around longer. And this year, Canada’s national championship is telling a story that goes far beyond the leaderboard.
We have always paid close attention to Canada at GBR, and not out of courtesy. More than 6% of our readers follow us from Canada — and among our paid subscribers, that figure rises to 17%. Our Canadian readers are disproportionately the people who run clubs, federations and golf businesses. When Canada moves, this newsletter listens.
But there is a second reason for this special report, and we want to put it up front. We don’t do politics at GBR. We do economics — and the economics of the U.S.–Canada relationship are impossible to ignore this week. The tariff confrontation of the past eighteen months has had real consequences: Canadian trips to the United States fell by more than a fifth last year, and golf has felt it directly — fewer Canadian snowbirds on Florida fairways, higher equipment and construction costs on both sides of the border.
Our editorial position is simple, and we will hold it: the North American golf economy is one economy. A Canadian bank title-sponsors marquee tournaments in both countries. American brands fill the merchandise tent in Caledon; Canadian players headline American broadcasts; and even now, American visits to Canada are rising again. Golf is living proof that the two economies are structurally bound together, and GBR will always defend those crossed interests — whatever the political weather.
So this week we put the spotlight north of the border. What we found is a market that has quietly stopped being underrated.
The economics of one week in Caledon
Start with the headline numbers. Golf Canada and the Government of Ontario project approximately $100 million in economic impact from this year’s tournament — roughly $84 million of it flowing through Ontario’s tourism, hospitality and event sectors. For calibration: the 2025 edition delivered more than $65 million for Ontario by the government’s own accounting, with over 130,000 spectators on site. A similar crowd is expected this week.
The machine behind those numbers is substantial. More than 2,000 volunteers are running the event. Twenty-six commercial partners are activating on site, alongside the Governments of Ontario and Canada — the province alone has put in CAD $1.6 million this year. The tournament travels worldwide through the PGA TOUR’s international feed, reaching over 200 countries in 30 languages, while at home TSN is delivering more than 32 hours of live coverage, on top of 30-plus hours of editorial programming in the lead-up week. Last year’s final round drew 3.4 million viewers on CBS in the United States, up 14% year on year.
Even the merchandise tent is a business story. The reimagined Golf Canada Fan Shop has grown its retail footprint by 50%, adding 13 new brands — Peter Millar, G/FORE, Nike, TravisMathew, Good Good Golf among them — under a new multi-year retail partnership, and record merchandise sales are expected this week.
“The RBC Canadian Open is one of the top sporting events annually in Canada and we are incredibly proud of the impact this tournament brings at the local, provincial and national level,”
Golf Canada CEO Laurence Applebaum told GBR this week.
“Canada’s National Men’s Open leaves a meaningful legacy in our host community and we look forward to that continuing in 2027.”
That last clause matters more than it seems — because the most interesting part of this story is not the tournament at all.
The tournament is the shop window. Behind it sits a national federation that has stopped renting and started building, a participation boom that the data says is structural rather than a pandemic hangover, and the most original answer we’ve seen anywhere in the world to golf’s oldest northern problem: winter. That is the part of the Canadian story your club, your federation or your investment committee can actually copy — and it’s where we go now.