Hello,
I am in the process of setting up the Canada Post shipping plugin, and wanted to know if this plugin only provides the rating web service from Canada Post, or can the Canada Post shipping labels be printed within HikaShop?
Yes the Canada Post shipping plugin only provide Canada Post shipping rates so that your customer can directly pay it to you, so no labels won't be printed by Hikashop, you'll have to do it with Canada Post.
If it does not manage printing the shipping labels, then how does the shipping label get prepared? Does the data have to be entered again on a separate Canada post service to generate the label?
The Canada Post shipping plugin only use the "Rating" API, the solution will probably be to create a plugin or directly edit the "Canada Post" plugin so the information regarding the order can be sent to Canada Post through the "Label printing" API so that your label can be easily printed.