Stewart Smith (politician)

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Stewart Smith was a long-time leading member of the Communist Party of Canada. He also served on Toronto City Council for a period in the 1940s.

Smith was the son of Reverend A. E. Smith, a social gospel minister who became a leading figure in the Communist Party. Stewart Smith was one of the leaders of the Stalinist faction, led by Tim Buck, that took over the party in 1929. Smith was elected to the party's Central Committee and continued to serve on it (and the party's Political Bureau) for decades. He supported the expulsion of Trotskyist and Right Opposition factions from the party. In 1934, Smith wrote the pamphlet Socialism and the C.C.F. which promoted the Communist Party's view that the newly formed democratic socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was an obstacle to socialism which served as a buffer between the working class and the capitalist class that needed to be defeated.

In 1935, Smith led the Canadian delegation to the world congress of the Communist International held in Moscow. When he returned, he echoed the Comintern's new line rejecting the previous Third Period sectarianism of the party and advocating class unity and ultimately Popular Frontism in its stead resulting in the dissolution of the party's red union, the Workers' Unity League into the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Smith, Stanley Ryerson and Leslie Morris were propelled into the leadership of the party in 1940 when the Communist Party was banned and Tim Buck, Sam Carr and Charles Simms fled to New York City to escape arrest. Smith, Ryerson and Morris were made leaders of the party's "operations centre" and effectively led the party until Buck, Carr and Simms returned from exile when the German invasion of the Soviet Union brought the USSR into World War II as an Allied Power.

Smith remained a prominent member of the party until the crisis that hit the international Communist movement in 1956. The combined shock of Nikita Khruschev's Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU and the Soviet invasion of Hungary led Smith to join the exodus from the party that reduced the Labour-Progressive Party (as it was then known) to a small rump. He was subsequently written out of the party's history.

After leaving the party Smith found success as an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry.

In the 1990s he authored his autobiography Comrades and Komsomolkas, My Years in the Communist Party of Canada ISBN 0-921633-55-6 .