The Koreans are showing their inexperience and naivety regarding very large scale and long term international defence sales, substantial offsets and pot sweeteners are common place everywhere and Canada is no different. Korea is a relatively new player in the international arms export game, with a lot of their sales being smaller scale but still impressive land system exports. There is a distinct difference between the sheer scale of effort and money at play between a few hundred armoured vehicles or rocket artillery going to Australia or Poland, and setting up a nation to nation cooperative effort to procure, build, operate and maintain a fleet of potentially 12 large conventionally powered submarines.
It sounds to me like sour grapes on the part of the Koreans, who just want to sell us something off the technical merits of the system alone instead of getting down into the nitty gritty of govt to govt procurement competitions. We're looking at something in the ballpark of a $60B~ procurement here, you don't get to win on technical specs alone.