Whither Buckets?

The election’s over; Grewal is no longer politics; Murphy is now looking for new employment; Dosanjh was re-elected, but will now sit on the opposition benches.

Most of the inquiries surrounding last summer’s events have resolved themselves: Transport Canada ruled that Grewal did not act improperly in the airport incident; he was cleared with only mild criticism by the Ethics Commissioner for his immigrant bond scheme; recently, he was seriously criticized in the Ethics Commissioner’s report on his taped negotiations last summer. The only report still outstanding–I think–is the RCMP investigation into those cheques last summer.

So, what’s to be done with this site? Not much different, I suspect. I will keep plugging away at understanding the affair and putting it in its context.

Why? Grewal is now out of the news and may well remain so forever, shouldn’t he disappear from the blogosphere, too?

I think it is important to recognize that there are many different kinds of blogs. Most blogs with a political focus might best be described as op. ed. or editorial, offering comment on recent political events. Some do this well, others less well. But it strikes me that this is the most typical blogging style. Blog post as editorial.

Buckets of Grewal has never been that. I have endulged in little editorializing, emphasizing collection, arrangment, and analysis of a wide range of issues associated with the Grewals, but especially the negotiations of mid-May 2005 and their recording and editing, as well as their varied aftermath.

If BoG has been not editorial, then, might it be described as journalistic?

Perhaps for a time it was so. But the journalistic analogy breaks down, too, since journalism is a creature of the moment. The Grewal tapes are no longer topical.

So what am I up to? Why continue?

Let us pursue the journalistic metaphor. All news stories eventually die. What happens to them then? What begins as news, attracting commentary, argument and rebuttal, inevitably slips from the hands of the journalist into those of the historian.

And this is what BoG has been evolving into for some time: a blog-history of the Grewal affair, written in real-time, with all the uncertainties, guesses, and mistakes of the historian’s work out in the open for anyone to see.

Now in this, I may be innovating, and I have some doubts that a blogspot blog is in fact the best mechanism for such an exercise. But if I can create something lasting that contributes to a fuller understanding of these events, I will regard BoG as a success.