 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 Labor-Progressive Party (as the Communists were known), and leader of the Labor-Progressive Party of Ontario, until the crisis that hit the international Communist movement in 1956.The combined shock of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet invasion of Hungary led Smith to join the exodus from the party, led by the resignations of Smith, J.B. Salsberg, Harry Binder and Sam Lipshitz, that reduced the LPP to a small rump.