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. 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. 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