Media BS aside, the labor shortage has certainly not brought any improved worker treatment.
(Incidentally, there is a union here, but they are not very effective at anything, as is the norm for Japanese unions)
This kabuki theater by business political advocacy groups is a perverse form of the old Soviet joke "they pretend to pay us; we pretend to work", except the pretend on the part of labor hasn't taken hold yet at large scales. Perhaps a perverse form of a Potemkin village is a more fitting picture.
After a lifetime of "overwork", retired japanese people opt to do part time work to stave off boredom. I think they just think of it differently.
There exist government employees whose literal only job is preventing deaths from exhaustion. Japan has at least a few hundred of these a year; the true number of excess overwork-caused death is probably low tens of thousands when you factor in suicides.
It's often because the ad is "fake" in the sense that is is a mandatory first step before applying for a temporary foreign worker because they "couldn't find" a Canadian to fill the job. I know someone who worked at a foreign recruitment company so I know all about the outright fraud that goes on.
I also know someone that works at a company that sells relatively large $ commodities into China, so I get to see all the fraud of how Chinese do business (big deals being chopped up into smaller pieces and deposited into "nieces and nephews" accounts, etc).
I refuse to believe the Canadian government isn't well aware this is all going on (for example, it accidentally leaked that they don't audit suspicious real estate deals if a non-Canadian is involved as it might be perceived as racist), which is pretty damn depressing considering more and more people including high paid professionals are struggling financially.