You should remain in a temporary apartment until you can secure a job. Would suggest applying all over Canada but in Ontario larger hubs of IT jobs are GTA, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo. Montreal and Vancouver are the other hubs. You need to look at commuting when you factor in these jobs so before signing a 1 year lease it would be very helpful to know where you will be working or else you could end up spending 4+ hours commuting everyday and spending a lot of money on that commute. Also depends on what type of IT work you specialize in. Did you not do some research about jobs in your field before moving to Canada? Even apply for some jobs?
Yes you can apply for CCB. You will need to be prepared to show your international income for the past 2 years.