Someday, probably when the wounds have started to heal, British Columbia's incompetent rollout of the harmonized sales tax will provide plenty of material for university courses dealing with business management, public policy, citizen engagement and more.

It's all been recounted many times, so we won't tell the entire story here. Besides, the list of mistakes is just too long.

Let's just say that the government of the day did nothing to set the stage for the announcement of the HST, did nothing to prepare taxpayers for the hit they were about to take - and, most disturbing of all, could not understand why individual British Columbians would have been upset.

The backlash cost a premier and a finance minister their jobs, and could yet bring down the premier's successor as well as many members of her caucus. The anger has not subsided - as the polls continue to show.

All of this because of a tax that, in theory at least, makes more sense than the old - and soon-to-return - provincial sales tax.

At this point, the key question is simple: Has the B.C. Liberal government learned from its colossal mistake? If not, it is destined to come up with more blunders that, like the HST debacle, could have been avoided.

The evidence, so far, is that the Liberals have a way to go.

The government spent 19 months fighting the release, under the Freedom of Information Act, of a 10-page pamphlet it had planned to send to all homes in British Columbia in 2010. A draft copy of the pamphlet was finally obtained last week by the Vancouver Sun, and it reveals that the proposed sales pitch for the HST was tied to Olympic nostalgia and the giveaway of three iPads.

The pamphlet was printed and prepared for distribution, but then, for whatever reason, the idea was scrapped. The pamphlets were shredded, despite the expenditure of $780,000 in tax dollars to design and print them.

The change of heart, reported at the time it happened, was disturbing and insulting. The government had information it wanted to share with us, spent our money to prepare it and then decided not to bother. In the end, we didn't get the information, but we still got the bill.

That level of arrogance can only be attributed to a government out of touch with the people it serves. We had hoped that Premier Christy Clark would have learned not only from the HST mess as a whole, but also from the pesky little details such as the shredded pamphlet.

But the 19-month fight to keep the pamphlet confidential should give us doubt.

For one thing, it's bound to make voters think that the government just doesn't get it, and doesn't understand why people are so mad. Clark's government needs to build trust; hiding the dirty laundry from a previous premier's time will not allow them to do that.

Beyond that, the delay was politically stupid. Get all of the bad news out early? Get it over with? No, the government would rather drag out the pain as long as possible, and keep enhancing the notion that voters were misled, mishandled and mistreated when the HST was introduced, and for months after that.

What are they thinking? What kind of bizarre strategy are they following? And why do we need the New Democrats - no offence to leader Adrian Dix - when the Liberals are doing a fine job of being their own opposition?

The pamphlet itself did not contain many surprises; it told us, among other things, that we live in a great place and the HST is wonderful. All quite predictable - and, at this point, it would be quite irrelevant as well.

Irrelevant except for the way the government stalled for 19 months. The sad truth is that the lessons of the HST debacle are still not getting through.