I was living in Vancouver until I moved to Waterloo for University, and will be graduating in a few months. It seems like everyone here is comparing Vancouver with US tech hubs like Seattle and SF, when there's a much more comparable target: Toronto.
Of course, this is anecdotal, but for every one of my 6 co-op terms in Waterloo, I always made finding a job in Vancouver one of my highest priorities, but in the end I always ended up choosing a job in Toronto over the Vancouver ones because the quality and selection of interesting places to work is just so vastly different ever single time.
Once you factor in the costs of living, it's ridiculously difficult for a young professional working in tech to justify choosing Vancouver over Toronto (and trust me, I tried, Vancouver is still by far my ideal city to live in), let alone SF/Seattle where the salary disparity comes into the equation.
A friend of mine who works for blackberry in mississauga feels otherwise about TO, he said the highest paying tech jobs are mostly in financial industry.
You're definitely right that housing price is affordable in TO but there are people who still want to go back and prefer Vancouver over TO. They don't mind to pay more for the quality of living in Vancouver.
I'm not sure about high-paying jobs (during my search, I've found the average salary to be in the same ballpark for Vancouver vs Toronto). But in terms of sheer number of interesting companies and opportunities, I've found Toronto to be superior by a large margin.
If you take a look at the AngelList jobs board (https://angel.co/salaries), you can see triple the number of postings in Toronto vs Vancouver, and more than triple of those that pay 60k+. This is by no means completely representative, but I believe it's good indication of a much more vibrant startup scene, and my job search experience so far seems to confirm this (despite being biased towards Vancouver due to personal preference).
Of course, this is anecdotal, but for every one of my 6 co-op terms in Waterloo, I always made finding a job in Vancouver one of my highest priorities, but in the end I always ended up choosing a job in Toronto over the Vancouver ones because the quality and selection of interesting places to work is just so vastly different ever single time.
Once you factor in the costs of living, it's ridiculously difficult for a young professional working in tech to justify choosing Vancouver over Toronto (and trust me, I tried, Vancouver is still by far my ideal city to live in), let alone SF/Seattle where the salary disparity comes into the equation.