Healthcare is free but Quebec also has horrible healthcare (they seem ok for pregnancy though). And your employer would cover that in the US anyway.
Rent has historically been reasonable but is quickly getting just as bad as other Canadian cities, and there's no availability.
I think we pay $60 / day for daycare, which gets subsidized down to ~$30 ish. You paid $300 in the US? There is subsidized daycare buy only if you're willing to wait forever.
Parental leave is only pays you 50k a year or so out of your employment insurance.
I agree that driving in Montreal is so horrible that I don't use the car unless I absolutely have to. Some would consider that a positive, I don't.
There are some good sides to Montreal in particular compared to other Canadian cities and US cities, but it's still not the land of milk and honey, and you still sacrifice a lot of money for it.
Daycare for us is about $15/day (calculator here: http://www.budget.finances.gouv.qc.ca/budget/outils/garde-ne...). Some of the prices we got for DC in 2021 were over $2500/kid-month and they've only gone up, so $150/day is indeed in the ballpark.
Driving? Chacun à son goût. I found driving here better than DC or Boston, but...yeah, I'm glad I don't do it.
I agree that it's not a land of milk and honey--but nowhere else is either.
An additional subtle one where Canadians are paying less than Americans: In many parts of Canada property taxes are remarkably low when compared to the USA.
There's all sorts of reasons for this. But bad medical services is a big problem in Quebec, along with language politics.
I like many things about Quebec, but I wouldn't relocate there.
The gross salary is indeed very low compared to US offers--moving to DC would have increased my gross salary by >2.5x.
However, add in various public services. I pay a few hundred dollars a year total for my family's insurance and medical care and there's little danger of this suddenly changing. Childcare is literally 10x cheaper---and that's after very generous parental leave (50+ weeks). Quebec has fairly strong protections for tenants, so the rent is rising but not wildly. The city is very walkable with solid mass transit, so I can walk, bike, or bus to most places, insulating me from gas prices. Once you start trying to 'buy back' a similar quality of life in a big American city, the salary gap is smaller than you'd think.
We're interested in moving back for other reasons (closer to family, more exciting jobs, etc) but the economic case, butter aside, is not wildly compelling at non-SV salaries.