Overall, much of the material focusses on Allan J. MacEachen's role as the Majority Leader of the Senate, particularly during the 1984-1991 period. During this period, MacEachen occupied the unofficial role of Leader of the Opposition, following the landslide federal election victory of the Mulroney Government in 1984. As the Opposition Senate Leader, representing the majority in the Senate, MacEachen and his Liberal colleagues opposed many of the initiatives put forward by the new Conservative Government, including NAFTA, the imposition of the GST, Bill C-103, an act to establish the Atlantic Canadian Opportunities Agency, Bill C-124, an act to amend the Canadian Labour Code and others. The decision, taken in 1991, by the Conservative Government to add Conservative Senators to the Senate ended MacEachen's role as a significant obstacle to an advancing Progressive Conservative Party agenda.
Also included in the series are the committee records of three initiatives that MacEachen chose to involve himself in as his career as a federal parliamentarian came to an end. MacEachen was a prominent Canadian member of the Bank of Montreal's International Advisory Committee and was a member of the Atlantic Bridge Group. A related record in the Special Issues sub-series details MacEachen's role as a participant in the review of Canadian Foreign Policy in 1994. Records relating to this committee work include minutes, agendas, briefing materials, correspondence and reports, detailing MacEachen's involvement in as well as the mandates, activities and goals of each of the committees.
Much of the material in this series, many, many small individual files containing a single piece of correspondence, a card, a memoranda or note-to-file and many informational files, seem to have been amassed with a view to assisting MacEachen compose a chapter, an anecdote or a reference for a post-mortem on a long and distinguished political career. These subject files, then, aside from the files that have been placed in specific, subject-based sub-series, have been left in this one, very large sub-series.
MacEachen, it is noted, continued to work on this monograph following his departure from the Senate in 1998, finally submitting a draft of the first nine chapters to a publisher in 2002. This draft, which covered MacEachen's early life growing up in Inverness, Nova Scotia, his formative years at St. Francis Xavier University and his political career up to 1968, was never completed.
