Harry Leslie Smith, a tireless advocate for the downtrodden who in his later years earned a legion of younger followers through his books, podcast and Twitter account, has died.

The 95-year-old had been receiving treatment in an intensive care unit in Belleville, Ont., after his family said he suffered a fall.

Smith, who split his time between England and Canada, was well into his 80s when he first rose in the public eye through his progressive writing, speaking engagements, social media posts and podcast, in which he railed against the likes of Donald Trump and championed social welfare and compassion.

A crusader against poverty and for public health care, he notably earning fame in a speech at the 2014 British Labour Party conference that drew on his poor childhood and left audience members in tears.

In his youth, he said, “doctors, hospitals and medicine were for the privileged few ... common disease controlled our neighbourhood and snuffed out life like a cold breath on a warm candle’s flame.”

Using his Twitter account, which had more than 250,000 follows, Smith’s son John tweeted the news of his father’s death at 3:39 a.m. Wednesday, later adding: “Never forget that my dad, Harry Leslie Smith died in the warm and caring arms of public health care.”

In his last days, people and organizations penned messages of gratitude and support for Smith, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the International Rescue Committee of Europe and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Trudeau last week tweeted: “Harry’s journey and courage have inspired so much love and kindness on this site, and in the real world too. Thank you for taking us along — we’re pulling for you.”

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Harry Leslie Smith is a 95 year-old veteran of the Second World War who saw the refugee crisis at the end of that conflict with his own eyes. Driven to act, he's spent the rest of his life meeting with and advocating on behalf of refugees in Canada and around the world.

Smith’s voice provided a perspective rarely heard on social media: that of a man with first-hand experience with the ravages of the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Born in 1923 to a poor family in Barnsley, England, he experienced the harrowing effects of the Great Depression from a young age. He witnessed his sister Marion become ill with tuberculosis and die in a workhouse infirmary — his family too poor to afford health care before the formation of Britain’s National Health Service.

He later served in the British air force in the Second World War, where he once again encountered extreme poverty in war-torn Holland and Germany.

“There was a stream of hundreds of thousands of refugees coming south,” he told UNHCR in a video posted to YouTube last month. “I can still see them. Absolutely pitiful. Hungry. Starving.”

Seeing one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history inspired his end-of-life mission: a tour around the world, launched four years ago, to bring attention to the global refugee crisis currently gripping much of the world.

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“I am the world’s oldest rebel,’’ he told UNHCR Magazine.

“Dirty snow, despair and destruction caked the Dutch nation during the last few months of the Second World War. The suffering of the people in Holland broke my heart. It deeply (disturbed) me when I encountered innumerable children orphaned by war who were famished beyond recognition,” he wrote on the GoFundMe page for the tour, called Harry’s Last Stand.

Near the end of the war, in Germany, he met Friede, the woman who would become his wife. She and Smith moved to Scarborough, where Smith managed a carpet store. The pair bought a home, raised a family of four boys and travelled the world.

In 1999, after 51 years of marriage, Friede died.

To deal with the grief, Smith began to write, drawing on his experiences as a child of the Great Depression to make parallels to today. Despite never making more than $40,000 at his carpet store job, he was able to buy a house and support a large family — the youth of today, he often said, do not enjoy the same luxuries.

In the days leading up to his death, John Smith posted to his father’s Twitter account, keeping his fans up to date on his condition and sharing the well-wishes of his supporters.

On Tuesday, hours before Smith’s death, around 12:50 p.m., his son posted a simple tweet: “It’s mortal.”

The message came shortly after Smith decided to discontinue life support and his family gathered at his bedside, John Smith told the Star.

“It was his decision,” he said. “There was no hope.”

In the U.K., Corbyn led a tribute to Smith in the British parliament Wednesday. In a tweet, the Labour leader called him “one of the giants whose shoulders we stand on.”

Former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband tweeted that Smith was “one of a kind who never wavered in his fight for equality and justice. We should all carry his passion, optimism and spirit forward.”

Smith said it was “fantastic” to see the impact his father’s work and life had on the people who held vigil with him on the internet. “It’s beautiful.”

“I don’t have long to live,” Smith wrote in one of his final Last Stand Dispatches, “a handful of years at best because I have almost reached the threshold of human life expectancy. But I am not worried; I’ve lived a full life filled with great sorrow but also profound joy. I don’t have much of a legacy to leave behind to show I was here because I am an ordinary man.

“It’s why I write, speak and fight for the underdogs of society because that will be (my) legacy, a reminder that all of us has a part to play in making the world a better place.”

With files from Rhianna Jackson-Kelso, Alexandra Jones and the Canadian Press