Senator Yuen Pau Woo

SENATORS’ STATEMENTS — Tributes

The Honourable Donna Dasko

Hon. Yuen Pau Woo: Honourable senators, I join others to pay tribute to Senator Dasko, who has made a lifetime of contributions to equality rights, political participation, polling and law-making.

What is the thread that connects her life’s work in these domains? The obvious answer is that she is committed to social justice, democracy and good governance, and has found multiple ways to advance these issues.

However, I think there is a deeper explanation that has to do with her training. Senator Dasko has a PhD in sociology and possesses that quality of thinking that the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills calls “the sociological imagination.” It is the capacity to distinguish between what Mills calls the “troubles” of individuals and the “issues” that face societies. Mills saw the potential of sociology as a discipline capable of imagining the future and foreshadowing it.

That is our Donna Dasko, whose work on equality rights, especially the representation of women in politics, imagined a better future and not only foreshadowed it, but agitated to make it happen through Equal Voice, of which she was a co-founder.

The sociologist in Senator Dasko could see the obstacles in the way of individual women who sought political office as well as the collective problem of not having more women in politics. She became a part of the solution when she was appointed to the upper house in 2018, at the time, bringing the share of women in the Senate to a then-record high of 45%. Even with gender parity in the Senate today, she is continuing to work on the foundations of equal representation through her Bill S-213, calling for more demographic information from the Chief Electoral Officer.

Her legislative interests echo the thinking of Jürgen Habermas, another giant in sociology. He believed in the importance of the public sphere and the role of national debate in shaping public policy. If you ever wondered about Senator Dasko’s fixation on leaders’ debates during an election, the answer is her sociology training.

Yet another famous sociologist Anthony Giddens once described polling as having a “double hermeneutic.” The first hermeneutic is the interpretation of the polling data, and the second is how the results of the poll can shape outcomes on that very issue. Senator Dasko not only understands the double hermeneutic but she has, in her opinion polling on the Senate, added a third hermeneutic, which is the application of her own agency and political action in fostering a more independent Senate.

If it weren’t for her polling on public perceptions of the Senate, we would not know that, in 2026, 79% of Canadians want future governments to continue to choose independent senators or that, for the first time in a decade of polling, positive impressions of the upper chamber outweigh negative ones.

It is the triple hermeneutic of Senator Dasko’s work in the Senate that has, in part, contributed to the steady improvement in public perceptions of the upper house.

I don’t know when we will have another sociologist and pollster appointed to the Senate, but in Senator Dasko we had someone who brought her expert training to the work of the upper house at the very time when changes to the Senate appointment process allowed for those skills to be applied effectively.

We will miss you, Donna, but you have taught us to have a “sociological imagination,” and we will do our best to live up to your example.