Roland Penner (July 30, 1924 – May 31, 2018) was a political activist and lawyer who became a cabinet minister in the Manitoba provincial government and dean of law at the University of Manitoba. Education and early career Penner was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the son of Winnipeg alderman Jacob Penner (d. 1965) and Rose Shapack (d. 1970). His father was from a Mennonite background, and his mother was Jewish. He served in Europe during World War II in the Canadian artillery. At the end of the war, he earned credits at the Khaki University of Canada. He continued his education at the University of Manitoba, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949 and an LL.B. in 1961. He began working at the University of Manitoba in 1967, and became a professor in 1972. From 1972 to 1978, he was the president of Legal Aid Manitoba, and from 1979 to 1980, he was president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. In 1949, he married Adeline ("Addie") Wdoviak, and in 1982, he married Janet Kay Baldwin. Political career Penner's parents and his older brother Norman were active in the communist Labor-Progressive Party. In the federal election of 1953, he ran as a candidate of the party in the predominantly middle-class riding of Winnipeg South Centre. He finished a poor fourth with only 504 votes. He also ran as an LPP candidate for school trustee in the Winnipeg municipal election of 1953. Penner left the Labour-Progressive Party in 1961, part of a mass exodus in the years following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech on Joseph Stalin's crimes. His brother Norman had left in 1957, while his father Jacob remained a party member. Penner completed law school and practised criminal law for several years before becoming a law professor. In 1980, he announced that he would seek the nomination of the New Democratic Party in the riding of St. Johns in the 1981 election. There was some speculation that Penner's communist past would damage his political ambitions, especially as Winnipeg alderman Joe Zuken had lost a mayoral election the previous year when his communist politics became an issue. Penner rejected this suggestion, however, saying, "There's a fundamental difference between Joe and myself in that I'm not a member of the Communist Party. I'm a member of the NDP. [...] I was a member of