Victoria is one of those scenes that is very bimodal. You have almost two entirely different communities that don't often interact. If you can make the jump out of the larger group of companies that are playing at lower stakes you can do pretty well.
That being said, the opportunities are limited, and I'm not surprised that you found more success elsewhere.
I live in Victoria which is one of the tech hubs in Canada, although definitely one of the smaller ones. The cost to living vs salary is not in a great spot right now but it's definitely doable.
If you are single or don't have any kids I think it is a lot more reasonable -- it's quite difficult to find housing for larger families. Even so, if you are capable of getting a good job working remote for a company it is possible to make it work.
I will say that Canada is in a bit of a flux right now. We are having an affordability crisis, and the cost of everything is going up.
It's not impossible to make a good life in Canada, but I think it's becoming increasing difficult and definitely not something that should be taken for granted.
With all the stats available I wonder if it would be possible to show which zone the ball went into.
I did a little bit of work on pitch prediction and we were able to get a pretty good result predicting which zone the ball would go into. I think we were around 36% accurate with a specific pitcher. I built a realtime predictor on live games which was pretty fun. Wish I had know about this.