Do we like them?

Do we like Steve Smith?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record and a long, well-honoured career, but the search found little on his views or charity, so we can't go higher.

Steve Smith is the Toronto-born comic behind Red Green, the duct-tape-worshipping handyman in the plaid jacket. He studied engineering at the University of Waterloo, trained as a teacher and taught primary school before comedy took over. That mix of tradesman logic and classroom patience pretty much is the Red Green voice.

The route there was long and unglamorous. He and his wife Morag formed the duo Smith and Smith, opening for acts like Ricky Nelson and Roy Orbison, and the Smith & Smith sketch series ran for 195 episodes. Red Green first turned up in that show before getting his own, which debuted on CHCH in 1990 and ran for more than 300 episodes through to 2006.

On the harm test, we went looking and came back empty-handed in a good way. No reporting we could find shows him campaigning against anyone, pushing conspiracy theories or turning his platform to grievance. The caveat is honest: he rarely talks politics in interviews, so this is a pass on the record we could see, not a deep look into his views.

The good-person search was equally quiet. No court rulings, lawsuits or credible allegations about him turned up. Don't be thrown by the other Steve Smiths in the search results: the NFL receiver with a lawsuit and the cricketer with the ball-tampering scandal are different blokes entirely.

Nothing new on him lately that we could confirm from a reliable outlet. In 2019 he told Yahoo the farewell tour would be his last, though he said he wasn't retiring, just done with touring, and floated a podcast as the next thing. He has since kept the Possum Lodge world going online, but we couldn't open a major news source on that.

The honours are real. He won Gemini awards in 1989 for Comedy Mill and 1998 for his performance on The Red Green Show, collected the Earle Grey Award in 2005 and was appointed to the Order of Canada. His audience, he said, is diverse, and he reckons attitude matters more than background. We found no documented charity work beyond that, so we're not inventing any.