Usually they say go to the the school in your destination province. However, in this case i would urge you to consider Dal. Dal is a great school and there are so many Dal grads in BC.  Premier David Eby is a Dal grad. Dal had the most success as an out-of-province school in  the last Vancouver recruit. When I attended a BC MAG articling panel, the crown prosecutor on the panel was a Dal grad and told me that they have no preference for in province schools.  Also, look up the tuition for both schools. TRU is surprisingly high given the university does not fund the faculty well.

Being a mature applicant lowers the weight given to grades, but doesn't eliminate it. Having said that you have a strong LSAT score. Use your application to explain why your GPA was low, use that LSAT score as evidence of your academic ability. Build in how your work experince has shaped you too.  All of this, paired with a applying broadly, will give you decent odds of an acceptance somewhere. The better your narrative and experince, the higher those chances go. 

Be careful of conflating the recurit and biglaw. The vast majority of the recruit is in fact, not big law at all.  Your grades, frankly, are going to hurt your odds of landing a bay street firm or some of the pickier botiques. But there are many options avalible to you and the answer to your question is that many people have found success in the recurit with grades much like yours.  You can help yourself by crafting excellent application materials and applying broadly. 

nope, I don't think so. Idk why it is taking so long and why this year's cycle is going by so slowly 

Ooo, okay, this is very comforting to know. I feel like my law school MC questions were either written as trick questions or mistakes so I have been trained to really pay attention to those details.  OH, okay yes this makes sense!! And glad you echo the same advice. I am so used to trickiness in law school it is a bit hard to turn that part of my brain off, but I will do my best to do so.  And shoutout to that last bit lol the materials are so long and, I am noticing, a bit repetitive. Thankfully, I have great technology that makes reading more fun (aka Speechify), but it is still an immense amount of work.    Thank you both for your help!!!

Applying as a mature student with 5 years work experience. I don't really have the option to retake any more semesters due to full time work, do I have a shot next cycle?

Tl;dr: There are former/current students with similar grades that have secured a 2L recruit job, but it is not the norm. Apply anyways because you never know and it's good practice. Consider your motivations for wanting to work on Bay Street and determine if those motivations can be satisfied working in another type of position. If you strike out during the 2L recruit, the "door to Bay Street" is not closed for your career. There absolutely are current/former students "out there" that have landed jobs on Bay Street with similar 1L grades, but it is also important to recognize that they are not the norm. I am an advocate of the "grades aren't everything" perspective when it comes to the 2L recruit, but at the same time, it would be foolish for me to act like grades are not a leading measure that full-service firms use to assess the applications that they receive. If you want to apply to Bay Street firms during the 2L recruit, absolutely do so. You will only ever have no chance of landing on Bay Street if you opt to not apply, and even if nothing materializes, I do believe it is a net positive because it forces you to update your application materials, draft an array of cover letters, and sharpen up your interviewing skills - all of which are beneficial for the subsequent applications that you would have to make. I want to also add that you should consider, if you have not already, the exact reason(s) why you want to work on Bay Street. Perhaps some of those reasons will not be exclusive to this work type, but others will. For example, if you want to make as much money as you can in practice while staying in Canada, working on Bay Street will afford you that outcome short of opening your own firm and it being both busy and profitable, which comes with a myriad of difficulties (especially as a junior). However, if what you are seeking is dynamic and engaging files to work on and you do not necessarily care about your clients' prestige/org size or the worth of the files/deals you are on, you can absolutely find this type of work outside of Bay Street. If you want to end up on Bay Street and you are unable to do so, you can still end up there in your career. The largest firm in my hometown (which is outside of Toronto) has 30-50 lawyers on staff and provides services in 8-10 practice areas. Approximately 75% of the articled students and juniors (i.e., 1-3 years post-call) on staff at the firm that have left in the past ~5 years have left for Bay Street associate positions. This is not abnormal for mid-sized GTA and southern Ontario firms when they have senior associates and partners that are well-connected to, and/or often work on files opposite from, Bay Street lawyers. I am not saying it will be easier to get a Bay Street job if you do not land something in the 2L recruit, but it will absolutely remain as a possibility for you depending on where you work, what your practice area(s) is/are, and what your network looks like.