These files pertain to meetings which the Council, its representatives and member agencies sponsored or otherwise attended, or, in a few cases, simply considered of sufficient importance to retain a record thereof. Their venue was normally Montreal i if they transpired elsewhere the location and/or auspices is generally indicated in the file title. With surviving records beginning with a 1946 Community Planning Institute (file 877) and ending in a 1973 Notre Dame de Grace Conference on the Quality of Life (file 1041), such gatherings ranged from the comparatively structured format of the annual meeting of the Canadian Welfare Council devoted to the general review of activities, to the more informal regime but focused concerns of seminars, workshops and institutes. Geographically, their settings varied from BaieComeau in the east to Vancouver in the west, and from large metropolitan centres to the Laurentian rusticity of Ste. Adele and L'Esterel. Particularly heavily represented here are Community Funds and Councils of Canada meetings and management staff training seminars, 1968-1971. Important to the development and maintenance of personal contacts in the social welfare field as well as the exchange and up-dating of information, this series features proceedings, reports, briefs and correspondence.

This is the smallest series. Indeed, while a few scattered items in Administrative Records and Committees (for example, files 262, 454, 543, 770 and 858) deal in varying degrees with budgets, grants or other aspects of finance, only twenty-one files, representing the years 1962-1972, comprise the MCSA Financial Records Series in the McGill University Archives. However, Financial Federation and Welfare Federation data for earlier periods, as well as further important documentation of the United Red Feather Services' role, remain in the holdings of Centraide, 493 Sherbrooke Street West. Here can be found financial statements, ledgers, pension records, correspondence, budgets, minutes and related reports which fill in the MCSA picture much more completely.

Nonetheless, the Council Financial Records Series' most complete run of material in the McGill Archives (ten files bearing the title, Budget and United Red Feather Services Budget Committee, each covering a consecutive year, 1962-1971), constitutes a major functional contact between the MCSA and the main source of funding in its last decade. Also of note here are such miscellany as financial statements of the Foster Home Recruiting Centre for 1969 and the Research Department, 1967-1971.

While MCSA documents earlier sometimes construed the term "project" so generally as to encompass virtually any activity in the social welfare field (see, for example, the statement on the Council Program, 1941-1954: file 206), no identifiable Projects and Task Forces Series existed until the 1956 New Areas Recreation Project relocation of the old inner city Iverley Community Centre to the rapidly growing post-war suburb of St. Laurent (files 816 and 1192) . This series, which proliferated in the 1960s, is the most socially activist and even politically radical in the implications of the programmes some of its documents promote. It is also the most ambiguous to the extent that, because of the vagaries of the MCSA's filing practices and assignment of titles, in some cases it is unclear as to precisely what project (though not which task force) a given file pertains.

The largest series, Projects and Task Forces in general reflects a change in mood from the comparative conservatism of the 1950s and, while still providing traditional services like research, deals more concertedly in consumer and tenant advocacy, and self-help and Dhands on D community involvement, including the encouragement of citizens' and other pressure groups. Moreover, though the participation of the Council and its members in and with other organizations had always been a matter of course, in Projects and Task Forces this involvement, especially in the last half decade or so of the institution's existence, sometimes took the form of the MCSA role and identity becoming submerged, almost marginal. In important fields like housing and urban redevelopment, and the coordination of efforts to alleviate and eliminate poverty, the Council would seem to have been losing the initiative and becoming just another player on a wider, and increasingly francophone, welfare team.

Correspondence, briefs, reports, minutes, press clippings and press releases, as well as lists of supporters and mailing lists, are all well represented, but this is the only series to preserve public petitions (these are found in four of the Lower Bus Fares for Senior Citizens files). A substantial portion of the holdings are committees which might otherwise be expected to appear mostly or totally in the Committees Series. However, their original Council inclusion in Projects and Task Forces has been maintained. Noteworthy in this respect are the Committees on Quebec Social Assistance, Housing and Urban Renewal, Greater Montreal Anti-Poverty Coordinating, Pointe St. Charles Coordinating, and Safe Label ... Safe Closure.

The provision of day care for the children of working parents, with -Day Care- appearing in 84 titles as listed, constitutes the largest concentration of data on any subject in this series. But other themes are also numerously addressed.