I have not seen a published obit, but the death of political scientist and author Denis Smith is noted on the Puckstricken Instagram account of his son Stephen Smith (who produces the Puckstruck blog about the history of Canadian hockey).
Denis Smith, who taught for a long time at Trent University (and later at Western) was one Canadian political scientist with an interest in Canadian history, and the author of a book about the 1970 October crisis, one on Canadian foreign relations, and perhaps best known, Rogue Tory, his biography of John Diefenbaker. While a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the 1950s he played for Oxford's hockey team (!) in international competitions.
We never met, but we corresponded a bit. He shared my view (or I his) that the leadership selection processes favoured by the Canadian political parties (i.e., reducing to spectators the MPs actually elected to represent the Canadian people) is the best and highest support of prime ministerial autocracy ever created, and needs to be done away with. Given the profound resistance to that idea among political scientists and historians (let alone politicians), we used to cheer each other on from time to time.
