DANIA DAGENAIS BIO

Date and Place of Birth:  Sept.21,1964, Montreal, Quebec, Canada  
Mother: Maria Sviatoslava Lesiuk b.1935, Sokolivka, Ukraine
Father: Joseph Antoine Clement Dagenais, b. 1935 Ste. Angele-de-Monnoir, Quebec

Dania Dagenais is presently Deputy Regional Director and Senior Counsel in the Immigration Law Division of the Ontario Regional Office of the Department of Justice. She obtained her law degree from McGill Law School in 1993 and also has a B.A. in Modern Languages (McGill University) and a degree in Business Administration (University of Ottawa). Dania’s mother came to Montreal, Canada in 1950 with her parents and her brother, escaping Ukraine first to Vienna, then various places in Germany and after the war spent some years in a displaced person’s camps in Mittenwald, Germany.

Dania’s father, Clement Dagenais, born on a small Quebec farm, the twelfth of sixteen children, mastered the Ukrainian language when he married Maria Lesiuk. He became very involved in the Ukrainian community, taking up positions on the school board and at the Ukrainian Plast* camp Baturyn in Quebec. Consequently all their four children spoke Ukrainian from birth.

In 1988??  Dania met her husband Orest Kobylansky, originally from Stoney Creek, Ontario, at a Ukrainian wedding and they married in 1991 in Montreal. Both attended Ukrainian Saturday school and Plast and are still active today  in Plast and in the Ukrainian community as are their children, Anya and Maxim. Dania maintains very close contact with her second cousins and family in Ukraine, as do her children. Anya has been a ski instructor at a Ukrainian camp for disadvantaged children in the Carpathians with Help Us Help**and has attended many rallies and protests in Vancouver and Toronto for Ukraine, as has Dania.

Dania’s first trip to Ukraine was in 1990 with her mother and she returned often, including seven times as an election observer. In the interview Dania talks briefly about the effects of today’s war in Ukraine on herself and her family, here and in Ukraine.

1. *Ukrainian Scouting organization
   

** Canadian NGO - helping children in Ukraine

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

Date and place of interview: July 31, 2022, Toronto, ON
Length of interview: 43 minutes
Interviewer: Ariadna Ochrymovych
Language: English

Interviewer: You said you had been an election observer, why did you choose to be an observer?

Dania: Yes I was an election observer a number of times.  Why I chose to be the first time? Well, I guess all the times, but the first time was because I wanted to help, it was in 2004 and it was the Orange Revolution and obviously the Ukrainian community outside of Ukraine was having rallies and all we kept on hearing about, well, everything that was happening in Ukraine, how the election had been rigged and all of that and so when there was an opportunity to go Canada was sending 500 election observers. I think it was the first time that Canada ever sent that many. When it was decided that the second round of the presidential election was going to be redone the whole world sent a bunch of election observers and Canada sent 500 and so that's when I decided to apply and I wanted to help, I wanted to be useful, I wanted to help Ukraine in its democratic development as a country and I felt well suited for it because I’m a public servant, I'm a lawyer, I speak Ukrainian. I spoke Russian, still do but spoke it better then.

Interviewer:  Did you at any point feel unsafe?

Dania: I got selected to go as a team leader, they asked me to be a team leader and then, lo and behold,  they're sending me to Crimea  and so it wasn't a question of being unsafe but Crimea was obviously then very very Russian-speaking, very pro-Russian, very pro-Yanukovych who had  won the rigged election so we felt that we were not necessarily wanted there as election observers, like why are you here? why are you meddling?

Then after that, after 2012 was 2014 that's the year that Poroshenko got elected there was just one round that time, almost unheard of that the President got elected with one round and then last but not least is 2019, I wound up going for both for the presidential election which ultimately got President Zelenskyj elected and I went for parliamentary elections. I was in Odesa first and then the last time i was ever in Ukraina was in Mariupol. It’s  very sad for me when Mariupol started to be under siege  (2022) and and knowing that it has been destroyed. When I was there, that theatre that was bombed (in 2022) I walked by and I have tourist pictures,  pictures in front of it, I had a driver from there, I had a translator from there I have no idea where they are, I don't think they're still there but I don't even know if they're still alive. That's the closest to feeling a little unnerved, not not so much unsafe but like unnerved about being so close to the front lines back then although we were about 20 kilometers away so it wasn’t  that close.

Interviewer:  I have this question, I don't have it quite formulated ... about feeling patriotic?

Dania: I've always.. Ukrainian, the Ukrainian culture, heritage is very strong in my life. I do feel that I’m Canadian Ukrainian, I’m a Canadian first but the patriotism was always there, I always felt a connection that's why i was so happy to go with my mother the first time in 1990 and it was still the soviet union and and then as I had a family my focus was more on that and so my  patriotism was more about  teaching my children Ukrainian, sending them to Ukrainian school that kind of thing so i guess i was demonstrating my patriotism that way.

And then when 04* happened my kids were small and I left Christmas time, like English Christmas time, that's when the election was and I left, my daughter was three and my son six, so to leave them for 10, 12 days that was probably the first time i had left them for so long but I felt like I had to, so that's I guess, that's the first time I felt sort of that patriotism outside of the fact that it’s my family heritage… it was more like I want to help this country, there's democracy there, there's fledgling democracy and I wanted to help and yes I think my patriotism then became more mature and more not just linked to the fact that that's my mother's heritage or that's how I was raised. It was more of a choice as an adult to continue and the pride I felt to see the development in that way and each time I went that Ukraine was developing in the right direction,  that people’s lives were getting better,  and that the quality of life was getting better.

* Orange Revolution