The whole country is a gigantic house of cards propped up by real estate, with horrible service quality, terrible healthcare, no jobs, ZERO innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship.
Having lived and travelled extensively, most Canadians want a house somewhere in the woods instead of doing something meaningful with their lives or try and innovate to build something.
All of this is propped up by rampant levels of immigration from China and India. Where US got the best talent from India, Canada got the worst, the ones who scam their way here and take the lowest level jobs.
Now all of this is coming home to roost. The next decade will be Canada's worst and if they do not learn that risk taking and entrepreneurship is the only way out of the mess they find themselves in, they will become a third world country in another decade.
Luckily, Canada is a lot better than your description.
We have people renting a single bed in the same room for 600$/mo in Toronto.
I suppose that however if you are an immigrant from a war torn country or a developing country, Canada would look like heaven.
Housing: Large cities like Toronto and Vancouver are unaffordable, but so are other large cities like London, New York etc. Just like most other countries, if you want to pay less for housing, go to a smaller city
Quality of life: how are you measuring this? By most measures (life expectancy, crime etc) Canada is well ahead of the US.
Innovation and salaries: Innovation is a bit hard to define, but salaries are definitely lower than the US. But here the US is also an outlier (at least for high earners) compared to most other countries. Tech salaries in Canada for example aren't lower than most European countries.