Jacob Penner (August 12, 1880 – August 28, 1965) was a popular international socialist politician in Canada. A founder of the Social Democratic Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Canada, Penner was elected to the Winnipeg city council in 1933. He would remain at that post until 1960, becoming the longest serving elected Communist city council member in North America.
During World War II, Penner would become the first Canadian Communist interned for political security reasons. He would be incarcerated from June 1940 until being granted his release in July 1942.
Biography
Early years
Jacob Penner was born August 12, 1880, in or near Ekaterinoslav (today's Dnipropetrovsk), Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, to a German-speaking Mennonite family. Appalled by the poverty among the peasantry in the Tsarist regime, Penner became a revolutionary socialist at an early age — political activity which forced him to emigrate to Canada in 1904.
Upon arriving in Canada, Penner worked for a time in the fruit orchards of British Columbia. He then moved east to the prairie city of Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1906, where he worked as a clerk and floral designer in a florist firm. and played a role as an organiser of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919.
First electoral campaigns
In 1921, he participated in the founding of the Communist Party of Canada and was the party's western organiser. That fall he ran as the candidate of the Workers' Alliance, the "legal political party" associated with the underground Communist Party at that time for the House of Commons of Canada in Winnipeg North.
With little hope of winning office in the election, Penner made use of the campaign to advocate for world revolution, not hesitating to declare his allegiance to the Communist International and appealing for the overthrow of capitalism. He declared in a published election statement during the 1921 federal campaign that
<blockquote>
"The Communist Revolution can triumph only as a world revolution.... In the years 1917, 1918, 1919, all the powers sought to overthrow Soviet Russia; in 1919 they throttled Soviet Hungary.... The existence of the proletarian dictatorship is in constant danger if the workers of other countries do not rally to its support.... The international solidarity of the proletariat is not merely a toy or a fine phrase for the workers, but a vital necessity, without which the cause of the working class is doomed to destruction."</blockquote>
In the 1921 race, Penner drew a total of 565 votes in the urban Winnipeg North electoral district in a losing campaign.
Penner also stood as a Communist in the 1927 Manitoba provincial election, garnering 2,015 votes on the first count in another losing effort.
Communist city council member
Penner first ran in a Winnipeg city political race in 1931 when he was selected as the Communist candidate for Mayor of Winnipeg. He would garner 3,954 votes out of 52,572 cast (7.5%), finishing in fourth place in a five candidate race.
Penner would run again in the annual election of 1932. This allowed for the Minister of Justice, in this case Ernest Lapointe, to order the arrest and detention of individuals deemed dangerous to public safety as prisoners of war. Penner was just beginning his third term of office as an elected member of the Winnipeg City Council at the time of his arrest. The pair were held at the Kananaskis internment camp with several hundred Germans suspected of Nazi sympathies.
Following Soviet entry into the war on the side of the British Empire, France, and the United States in the summer of 1941, Penner's incarceration became a cause célèbre, with Winnipeg politicians from across the political spectrum advocating for his pardon, culminating in Penner's release in July 1942.