A Glowing Dream: A Memoir
Roland Penner. Winnipeg, MB: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc, 2007; 306 pp; ISBN: 978-1897-289198, paper $28.95 ca.
By Donald C. Savage
Roland Penner was elected president of CAUT in 1979. He has now written a very readable account of a long and varied career in academe and in Manitoba politics. Penner was born in 1924 into an ultra-left wing and Jewish milieu in the North End of Winnipeg that had been heavily influenced by the Winnipeg General Strike and its aftermath. His father served for many years as a Labour Progressive (Communist Party) representative on the Winnipeg City Council.
Penner makes no secret of his and his family’s political connections — connections he maintained until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. During the Second World War he served in the Canadian army in northwestern Europe from Normandy to war’s end. At the close of the war he attended the army’s Khaki University and then, on demobilization, thanks to the veterans’ benefits created by the federal government, he returned to Winnipeg to attend the University of Manitoba to study in the faculty of arts and then in law.
On graduation, he practiced labour law in Winnipeg for 15 years, ultimately returning to the university as a member in the faculty of law. He was an active member of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association, where he was one of the leaders of the successful movement to unionize the faculty despite the unyielding opposition of then university president Ernest Sirluck. He became chief negotiator for UMFA’s first collective agreement which was signed in 1975.
This was a seminal moment both at the university and in CAUT because Manitoba was, at the time, the largest English-speaking university in the country to certify. The conjunction of CAUT and UMFA in Winnipeg led Penner to an ever more active role in CAUT. He gives an entertaining account of the early days of collective bargaining in CAUT. This work ultimately led to his election as CAUT president, an event which showed that the movement towards collective bargaining in CAUT was irreversible.
Subsequently he moved into a political career in the province of Manitoba where he was elected in 1981 as the NDP member for Fort Rouge. Later he became a member of the cabinet of the NDP government of Howard Pawley where he served variously as attorney general, minister responsible for constitutional affairs, chair of the treasury board, minister of education and house leader.
As attorney general he was much involved in the constitutional negotiation of the Mulroney years, which he discusses in some detail. Pawley has provided a foreword to this book. The Pawley government fell in 1988 in a vote of confidence, and was subsequently heavily defeated at the polls. Penner then returned to the university to teach constitutional law and later became dean of the faculty.
This, of course, is a partisan book, but Penner is generous in his recognition of the work of other faculty members across Canada and of staff with whom he connected at various points in his career. Those who write autobiographies frequently do not wish others to share the stage. Readers of this review should be aware, caveat emptor, that this reviewer is mentioned favourably several times in the text.
Like most politicians, Penner remembers old enemies, not always kindly but sometimes surprisingly favourably as with his treatment of Don Wells, the administrator who had the difficult task of dealing with the faculty union at Manitoba in its early days. All in all this is a book that should be of use to anyone interested in the recent history of higher education in Canada.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Donald C. Savage is a consultant in higher education, former executive director of CAUT and an adjunct professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal.