City politics needs more characters like Smith

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This article was published 15/03/2017 (3445 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Harvey Smith was a character in the best sense of the word. His recent passing reinforces the notion that characters such as Mr. Smith are both rare and vital to politics.

Mr. Smith died on Sunday at the age of 80.

At a glance, he may have been mistaken for a garden gnome who had misplaced his pointy red cap. But it wasn’t just the way the bearded life-long political activist presented himself that made him appear to be a character; it was the creative way the left-of-centre politician conducted himself during 18 years as a Winnipeg city councillor and two years as an MLA.

Mr. Smith was anything but a lawn ornament when it came to grassroots, neighbourhood politics and his caring about and paying attention to the concerns of the people in the inner-city neighbourhood where he lived.

He did that with unflinching purpose, uncommon passion and cheeky humour.

His sense of having fun with politics and his penchant for activism were on open display a decade before he was first elected to city council in 1980.

During the province’s centennial celebrations in 1970, while Mr. Smith was employed as a school librarian at River East Collegiate, he managed to persuade a young student named Fred Redekop to be painted head to toe and show up at the Manitoba legislature as the embodiment of the Golden Boy.

Mr. Smith also convinced students to hit the streets to buff up fire hydrants as a symbolic way of demonstrating civic responsibility and, perhaps, a way of suggesting to the city that it shouldn’t forget to look after the little things.

Later, when it came to looking after the so-called little people whose voices needed to be amplified at city hall, Mr. Smith borrowed again from his bag of comical tricks. In 2013, the year before his elected political career came to an end, Mr. Smith created a set of fake street signs named in mock honour after then-mayor Sam Katz and his executive policy committee and placed them in his ward’s most neglected back lanes.

All of this colouring outside the lines might have caused some to overlook him, but Mr. Smith’s mission was far from silly.

City hall in particular thrives with characters such as Mr. Smith, because it’s the level of government with the most direct everyday impact on citizens — the one that’s closest to them. Yet it can seem distant because it often appears to get bogged down in the mundane nature of its minutiae. It’s the actions and comments of characters who tend to be contrarians — the kind who don’t dress buttoned down and refuse to button up — who wake citizens up to the bigger issues.

Of course, over the years there have been other civic politicians who some might say qualify as characters and who have captured our attention in much different ways than Mr. Smith. There was something about Harvey Smith that separated him from the likes of them, though. He was a character with character.