Well thanks again for the replies. Nice input. I thought I had managed another post that dies after 3 answers, which to be fair, with the amount of details given, would have made sense.
To answer:
Renting market is super tight, and appartments with 3 rooms are super popular/competitive. We could push harder in this direction, but preliminary research shows few interesting options. That would be nice, to be honest.
We do want to throw some roots in one neighbourhood though, as the oldest will start school in September 2020. Would prefer not changing schools once this has started. I hated that when I was young. So this year feels like the make or break year...
The houses we are looking into are fairly typical houses in the (nicer) suburbs... They're not even that great houses. With more research I guess the price point would be closer to 500k. Still! We dont want to move out too far... But I suppose that is also an option. Then we'd need two cars. Sounds... unappealing.
We are tied to Montreal for our jobs, for sure. Would love to relocate. We do like the city here. If we relocated we would want to come back here eventually though. While we are working, the commute is an issue. Might not be for much longer - depending on this decision right here... This decision feels too big to be made, and in the meantime, we are just staying in our cramped place. Which is both good and bad. So I guess the next step is validation from internet forum users!