Income taxes are comparable to Ontario, maybe even more, because NYC has a special income tax levy.

Since you're using someone living in Ontario, let's say Toronto, to compare against someone living in NYC, let's break it down.

Ontarians also have to pay a provincial tax in addition to the federal. If we compare the New York state tax and New York City tax with Toronto, using marginal tax rates, someone in Toronto could potentially pay between 0%-46% in taxes (13.16% for Ontario and 33% federal for any income above 210k). In NYC, the marginal tax range is between 7.08%-12.47% (only 3.65% for NYC and 8.82% for the state for any income above $1.07M).

Now you might try and argue and say that these numbers are for the highest brackets and don't apply to the average person, but if you look at the middle class, someone making $80k in Ontario would pay up to 29.65% in taxes, whereas someone making $80k in NYC pays only up to 9.78%.

So not only is the CAD worth less, an Ontarian has less of it to spend.

Depends - but in the city food can be a lot more expensive than Toronto.

Let's use the Big Mac index as an example for this one, because it's universally available. The Big Mac index compares purchasing parity. It has the CAD listed at 8.9% under value, compared to the USD. What this means is for the same exact food item, a Canadian has to pay more.