I have found Kanawaki one of the most perplexing of courses in the potential Colt oeuvre. Very little of it makes much sense. The only hard reference I have found to Colt at Kanawaki is the 1923 article from the Lethbridge Herald that Karl posted at the head of this thread. How on earth would a writer for a small town paper from Alberta, almost 2,000 miles away from Montreal, have come across this factoid? I presume that it would have been agency copy, but can't prove anything. But equally, ten years after the event, how/why on earth would such a fact have been printed in error? It's not as though the paper had any interest in the matter.
Clearly Colt didn't lay the course out in totaiity. Carter's North American course list, which I found in the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, says that its seed was used to sow all eighteen greens, in September 1912. Colt hadn't been in Canada since spring 1911, and he was only in Toronto.
But equally, the club's own history says that the course did not open until late summer 1913, when fifteen holes were ready for play, and the full eighteen the year after. And we know that Colt was in Montreal in summer 1913, and that there was a close connection between the courses that Carter's worked on and the ones he visited. So a visit then, and a role in the design of the course, is not out of the question.
My suspicion, and it is only that, is that he visited during his stay in Montreal, and made suggestions as to the bunkering of the course. But obviously I cannot prove it. The only way that hard proof will ever be obtained is if there is something in the club's own archive. I have tried to contact them, but have been unable to do so.