So, rural land on Vancouver island is more affordable in the sense that there are less economic opportunities that come with that land, so the land costs less to buy. Which might be a good tradeoff for somebody who doesn't need to be near a job, but is not super useful to the majority of people who do.
And that does not cover dental or "other" items like physio.
No highly paid tech employee is paying 10s of thousands of dollars for Healthcare.
The employer is the one who pays that, and the Employee is probably paying close to nothing.
Healthcare is a disaster in the US.
But I wish people would stop spreading the myth that Canadian taxes are necessarily significantly higher than American ones. The highest federal income tax bracket in Canada is taxed at 33% [1], which is very comparable to US rates.
Certainly, provincial taxes do tend to push things a little higher, and by comparison there are US states with very low or non-existent tax rates. But if you live in SF or New York, with their high state and city taxes, your income tax burden would be barely any higher in Vancouver or Toronto.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150401050939/https://www.texas...
It also makes sense for richer people if the living conditions are better because people poorer than you have a safety net so you aren't impacted by their social problems, or if, e.g., universal government benefits like healthcare end up being better value than what is privately available elsewhere, perhaps because of economies of scale, or because you are effectively a co-owner of a monopsony purchaser, or because the safety net for the poorer people supplying the service means total labor costs can be less without them living in unacceptable security.
Well, you are impacted in that your taxes are higher.
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, btw, just wanted to point out that the social safety net isn't really a major consideration for wealthy people. Heck, my wife is Canadian and we considered moving to Canada a while ago—and we aren't even wealthy, just middle to upper middle class—but the math just didn't make sense. Much lower salaries, much higher taxes, plus insane real estate market. It was a much better deal to say in the U.S. and buy our own safety net.