When looking at typical Government of Canada contracts, HST or sales taxes, provincial sales taxes, are always included in contracts. The Government of Canada will pay the applicable provincial sales tax, HST and GST. There's no reason to believe it will be different this time, but DND made that an important point of disagreement between their estimates and ours. For that reason, and to ensure comparability between the numbers DND has put out and hopefully will put out in the future, and ours, we decided not to include provincial sales taxes or HST to ensure comparability for parliamentarians.
I see no obvious reasons why DND will be exempted from sales taxes, but maybe they will enter into agreements with provinces to exempt them from sales taxes. For that reason, and to avoid making that an issue as opposed to the real and central point of the life-cycle costs of $306 billion, we decided to exclude sales taxes to ensure comparability and to avoid a side discussion that is not central to the point of the surface combatant.