TORONTO — In the years after opening its first 18-hole golf course in Inverness, N.S., in 2012, Cabot stretched its portfolio overseas, building projects in Florida and Scotland, with its co-founder and CEO Ben Cowan-Dewar cutting the ribbon at a new St. Lucia location in June. But in its flurry of international expansion, the golf course developer currently only plans to open one more Canadian location—in Revelstoke, B.C., by 2025—putting it in more places abroad than on home turf.

With an “unbelievable landscape,” a “great brand” and hospitality names like Fairmont and Four Seasons, Cowan-Dewar believes Canada has all the right conditions for tourism to boom. But companies face big challenges to make that a reality.

“Canada is not a great place to develop right now, to be honest, and I think it’s become very, very, very difficult to do projects like we’ve done,” Cowan-Dewar said at The Logic Summit in Toronto last week. 

Cabot Links in Inverness, touted as Canada’s first true links golf course, began as a sort of pipe dream for Cowan-Dewar when he visited in 2004. At the time, the site was an abandoned coal mine. The town’s population had fallen to less than 1,300 from 10,000 at the turn of the 20th century. 

Decades later, the developer now has three courses in Inverness—with two ranking No. 10 and No. 39 on Golf Digest’s World’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses—and employs 1,000 people in rural Cape Breton. 

In an onstage interview with The Logic’s CEO and editor-in-chief David Skok, Cowan-Dewar talked about how Cabot helped transform a coal mine community, the challenges of building projects in Canada and how to lead in a time of uncertainty.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cabot Cape Breton is consistently rated one of the top golf courses in the world, and this is a story of transformation and innovation. Tell us a little bit about Inverness itself and how you’ve worked with the community to build up this resort.

They had a coal mine in the town of Inverness, which was mined from 1883 to 1953, and it sat idle for 50 years. The province eventually remediated it to try and pave the way to build a golf course. It wasn’t my idea—the community of Inverness had the idea as far back as the 1960s. 

I was 25, had rose-coloured glasses on, but I had a very clear idea that we could build one of the greatest golf courses in the world on this site. As I laid that out for folks, I think there was a healthy dose of skepticism. They’ve been trying for so long, they’ve had their heart broken—like so much of the rural world, change has not been a good thing over the last 50 years. On my first visit, I met a fellow at the gas station and I asked, “What do you think of the golf course?” And he replied, “That’ll never happen.”

The day before we opened, we had a Sunday cover of The New York Times sports [section] and a two-page article, which was just extraordinary. It was talking about how a golf course is transforming a coal mine community. And the reporter asked this fellow, “It’s opening the next day, the tents were up, what do you think?” The fellow said, “They’re not open yet.” I think that encapsulated the skepticism you face in doing these things, particularly doing something that has been talked about for 40 years.

We just tried to do what we said we would do at every point in the road. We tried to engage the community, and now we employ a huge percentage of the population and we’ve seen growth in the rural school population over the 11 years we’ve been open. If you think about what it’s like to employ 1,000 people in rural Nova Scotia … I think it’s not why we did it, but it’s why we do it today.

How did you keep the community on side along the way?

If you live in a community that literally saw its industry close in 1953, change is a pretty frightening thing. The skepticism changed to optimism, then changed to real fear—what does it all mean? There were lots of bumps in that road and there continue to be.

I’m getting slowly smarter after two decades where projects are a little bit easier, but I think it was so against the odds and it was so hard. We just tried to show up with the community, we built the boardwalk, we built beach stuff. Even as we did it, it wasn’t clear that it was going to turn the tide. We just started being community minded.

You literally work with Mother Nature on your course. How does climate change and sustainability come into play?

If this is going to be here long after you and I are gone, you’re taking an incredibly long view of your investments and of your practices. We were building on an abandoned coal mine that had sat unremediated for 50 years. So, you’re transforming a site that previously had been exposed tailings to a golf course. We were the first golf course in Nova Scotia to use the recycled wastewater from the town to irrigate. We use almost no pesticide and herbicide because it really is the naturally occurring grass. Those are the roots of sustainability.

You have an expansion into Revelstoke, B.C., coming soon, you’ve expanded into St. Lucia, Florida and Scotland. You seem to be doing more course development outside of the country than in the country. Why is that?

Canada is not a great place to develop right now, to be honest, and I think it’s become very, very, very difficult to do projects like we’ve done. It’s easy to look at Florida and everybody goes, “Oh, yeah, that’s Florida.” It literally is, “How can we help you get an investment, which will create 1,000 jobs, benefitting the rural community of Brooksville?”

I was in St. Lucia last week for the ribbon cutting of that project, where we’ll employ 1,000 St. Lucians, where unemployment is 20 per cent. Scotland is probably more welcoming than Florida to the project and to the investment. Maybe it’s even a bit shocking, but in the time we’ve been permitting the project in British Columbia, we will have built three golf courses in Florida.

You’re being somewhat diplomatic and I appreciate that. But just to be clear, you’re saying it’s harder to build things in Canada than elsewhere?

By every factor.

What is Canada’s strength?

There’s such an unbelievable asset in this country—which is tourism. Tourism in Nova Scotia is a bigger industry than fishing, and every politician will say, “No way.” And I said, “Yes, it’s bigger than agriculture, it’s bigger than forestry”—and they’d be gobsmacked—“and it’s bigger than mining.” And they were literally like, “This is amazing.” And then you tell them it’s bigger than all four of those industries combined. Tourism is something that works in so many parts of this country. We have the raw materials, we have the unbelievable landscape, we’ve got a great brand in Canada.

Are you seeing particular labour shortages in the rural communities that you’re working in?

We made investments in staff housing, so we were prepared for that and we’re fully staffed this year. We haven’t had temporary foreign workers as a possibility for many years, which has been crippling in the hospitality sector in rural areas. So, we’ve had to come up with partnerships with Cape Breton University and the Nova Scotia Community College to fill all [the positions].

I look at Norway—the person who checks you in, makes your cocktail and makes breakfast—it’s the one person, and that’s really just a function of much higher wages, fewer people, and I think every place in the developed world will move towards that.

I would argue we are living in a time of unforeseen conditions. Just look at this past weekend in Russia, anything geopolitical in a moment’s time can change the forecast for growth in your business. What’s your advice on navigating the complexity of uncertainty?

I think our focus is on doing projects that will last for hundreds of years in countries that have democratic rules and respect property ownership rights. St. Andrews in Scotland has literally been there for 500 years. I can’t tell you what the banking sector is going to look like in this vicinity, or what retail is going to look like in five years, but I hope our project will be great 100 years from now. I think the longer term we can take, the less the short term volatility. That’s our strategy.