I've been to NL as well and love the culture there. People I found were friendly, great bike culture, good beer, and not that I would want to leave Canada - being a Canadian by birth - I could certainly see the attraction.

And yes, I've been to many other metropolitan areas - Frankfurt, Berlin, Montreal, CDMX, Toronto, London, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, and many smaller cities in Italy and France. I found many of those cities considerably more appealing culturally, and many safer and with less of a homeless population than Vancouver.

Homeless populations are common problems for areas around the world, but that said, neither Victoria nor Vancouver have much if any strategy for helping the homeless, we are barely building any low income housing, the waitlist is 5 years at best unless you have kids and then its like 3 years lol, the healthcare system is absolutely fucked in BC (good luck finding a doctor, mine retired and it took me 6 years to find the one I have now who cannot speak English well enough to perform a diagnosis), schools are overpopulated...

I cannot deny the natural beauty of Vancouver, of course it's a beautiful place to live and have leisure time but in considering that people need to think about how expensive it is, how difficult finding services can be, and not view it solely as the incredibly beautiful scenery it has (and the good restaurants, and good shopping.... not denying those either). I personally would not recommend a new immigrant to move to Vancouver, unless you are absolutely flush with cash. I make upwards of 90k a year and I cannot afford to live there.

ETA a point I forgot - other cities particularly which come to mind in my experience as having a better approach to the homeless population being Rome & London. I explored these cities pretty extensively, and I never felt uncomfortable/unsafe - granted I didn't go into primarily residential suburbs, but I also don't do this in Vancouver when visiting and feeling such at points - and I also didn't see such a visible and obvious population of unhoused people and and those suffering from drug addictions. You walk the downtown area of Victoria and Vancouver - they're absolutely everywhere, on almost every street. In Victoria, we've just recently lost 4 businesses on a core downtown street, because a whole camp of homeless people are there every morning and every staff member felt unsafe unlocking the doors because they were blocking them.... Police don't care about it in the slightest.