The arrangement of the submissions to Council and reports of Council committees, relating to the Council function of auditing provincial public accounts, 1751-1794, was examined in 1985-1987 with a view to reconstructing the original order - voucher and statements filed in numeric sequence according to the schedules of presentation for audit to be found in the Minutes. During the initial attempts to reorganize the records in 1986-1987, every effort was made to correlate the vouchers and statements from various officials, and those statements with the Report of the auditing committee. Numerous difficulties were encountered, as no numbering sequence was developed and consistently used (a direct contrast with the system developed in Upper Canada), and there were frequent delays in auditing. Researchers should note that documents relating to activities of a particular year may be found audited several years later. For purposes of arrangement, the key date is that of auditing (insofar as that could be established). Where the date of auditing could not readily be determined, the filing was based on the date a statement was prepared for submission, or date payment was receipted. This reorganization work has yet to be completed., Records which, by virtue of their provenance and date, would normally be included in this series are found in other fonds in the holdings of Library and Archives Canada. For practical reasons relating to the arrangement of such records by the custodians who inherited them after 1791, they cannot now be included within the present fonds and series. A number of records currently described in RG 4 (Records of the Civil and Provincial Secretaries, Quebec, Lower Canada and Canada East), series A1, vols. 1-52, date from the Province of Quebec period and are documents which the Councils would have created and/or accumulated. They include many reports, returns and accounts relating to the expenditure of public funds and the collection of money on the government's behalf. As explained in the 1953 published inventory (Public Archives of Canada, Manuscript Division: Preliminary Inventory, Record Group 1, Executive Council, Canada, 1764-1867), the Council records included in those volumes were already inter-mingled at the time of acquisition with records of the Civil and Provincial Secretaries for Lower Canada. This inter-mingling is attributed in the 1953 inventory to the fact that for many years the offices of Clerk of Council and Civil Secretary were held in plurality by one individual who, apparently, did not keep the records separate, although there is reason to believe that the inter-mingling is attributable to interference with the records by a later custodian (the Keeper of the Records after 1867 in the Office of the Secretary of State of Canada). Regardless of the explanation, it was recognized in 1953, and is no less true today, that it is not feasible to separate out the records belonging to each office and to attach them to their respective fonds. Therefore, these records have been left as part of RG 4 and users should consult that fonds.
