That's sort of the point, location in a city? Yeah. But an entire city or country where $4k/mo isn't enough for food? Sounds like the people of the country got scammed by politicians and corporations.
Welcome to Canada comrade, where interest rates, monetary policy, corporate consolidation, and corrupt politicians combined to create a country where house prices became obscenely unaffordable first in a few major cities and then in recent years in every podunk town in every province in the country. And with obscene housing prices comes obscene cost of living. $4k/mo doesn’t get you anything close to a reasonable lifestyle.
In the middle of nowhere I'd not buy a ready-made home but a plot of land - which I assume still to be affordable - and build my own house there. I've been to the Yukon - paddled the whole thing from Whitehorse to the Bering strait in a canoe in 2001 - and actually planned to do something like that. I ended up moving to Sweden instead and more or less count my blessings now that Canada has managed to lose a lot of its appeal in the decades between then and now.
Our economy has been based for too long on debt and real estate. When Canadians became the most indebted households in the G8, the government simply opened the floodgates to immigrants to ensure rents and house prices would stay high.
We are following the same path as the UK now in that the conservative parties are moving rightward and gaining ground on populist notions of “this isn’t the Canada we grew up with” (because of immigration) which plays to certain folks who are upset that their quality of life has eroded due to the increase in housing costs. Now these groups have been whipped into such a fury they’ll vote against their own interests like electing politicians who commit to privatizing healthcare, one of the cornerstones of our identity.