Jacob Penner

Jacob Penner
Penner as a young man
Born	(1880-08-12)August 12, 1880 Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine, Russian Empire
Died	August 28, 1965(1965-08-28) (aged 85)
Occupation	Politician
Known for	Co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Canada and Communist Party of Canada
Children	Roland Penner Norman Penner

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.

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. It was there that he met his future wife, Rose Shapack, a Jewish Russian immigrant, in 1906 during an address by Emma Goldman at the Winnipeg Radical Club. The pair married in 1912.

Penner would continue to work as a florist until 1917. He then moved to a position as a bookkeeper for the Workers' and Farmers' Cooperative Company in Winnipeg, where he would remain until the early 1930s.

A Marxist, he helped found the Social Democratic Party of Canada and was an opponent of conscription during the Conscription crisis of 1917. Penner was active in the Canadian One Big Union movement (OBU), and played a role as an organiser of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919.