 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 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.