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SUNDAY SCIENCE: THE BASSIST WHO CAPTURED QUEBEC’S SOUL TAKES ON ITS
SCIENTIFIC FUTURE  
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Norimitsu Onishi
August 2, 2026
The New York Times
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_ Jérôme Dupras is a member of one of Quebec’s most popular folk
rock bands. Now, as the province’s chief scientist, he will help
shape its environmental destiny. _

Jérôme Dupras is the bass player in Les Cowboys Fringants, a
popular band that has been writing and singing about Quebec’s dreams
and disillusions for a generation. The name translates to The Dashing
Cowboys., Photographs by Nasuna Stuart-Ulin

 

He’s been described as the Clark Kent-turned-Superman of Quebec.

No horn-rimmed glasses or red capes. But during the day, typically
dressed in earth tone blazers, he supervised graduate students and
worked on scientific papers on ecological economics. After the sun
sets, chest bare and a tie knotted around his head, he played bass
guitar
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before frenzied fans and tossed them beers from the stage.

Across Canada’s French-speaking province, Jérôme Dupras has long
been known for his double identity: a well-known expert on the
economic value of the environment, who also happens to be a member of
Les Cowboys Fringants, or the Dashing Cowboys, one of Quebec’s most
famous folk rock bands and the one that best captured the province’s
dreams and disillusions of the past generation.

Now the researcher and rock star has assumed yet another identity
after the provincial government recently appointed him as chief
scientist of Quebec.

Mr. Dupras in his new office.

“There is an artistic dimension that is very, very strong in
science, and there is also the social capital that our band succeeded
in building,” Mr. Dupras said. “So this artistic side leads me to
engage in a scientific dialogue with the public.”

 

 

While the position of chief scientists exists elsewhere, it is a
particularly powerful one in Quebec. Mr. Dupras will not only advise
the government on scientific matters, but he will also oversee the
province’s scientific research budget of a quarter billion Canadian
dollars.

Mr. Dupras, a professor of natural sciences at the University of
Quebec in Outaouais, will also become the most prominent voice on
politically sensitive scientific issues. As a scientist and a
musician, Mr. Dupras has spoken often of the importance of protecting
the environment and natural resources. Would joining government alter
his message, many in the Quebec news media asked after his
appointment. Especially as the Canadian and Quebec governments focus
more on economic growth rather than environmental issues in the face
of President Trump’s trade war.

In an interview in his new office in downtown Montreal, Mr. Dupras,
46, said it was a “legitimate question” because of his long record
on the environment as a scientist, artist and activist. His new
position, he vowed, would not silence him.

Mr. Dupras’ Rickenbacker 4000-series bass.

“When we talk about climate change,” he said, “I can’t deny
the fact that we’re facing an emergency, and that there are climate
change mitigation measures that need to be implemented across all
sectors of the economy.”

Expectations are high because of his prominence.

Vincent Larivière, a professor of information science at the
University of Montreal, says Mr. Dupras’s “aura” will give him
the freedom to speak candidly — if he chooses to. Just as his
appointment was universally praised, no future government would dare
remove Mr. Dupras before his five-year mandate was up, Mr. Larivière
said. (Polls [[link removed]] show Quebec’s governing
party in third place ahead of a provincial election scheduled for
October.)

“An ordinary politician knows Les Cowboys Fringants,” Mr.
Larivière said. “An ordinary politician doesn’t know science.”

“There’s absolutely nobody like him in Quebec,” he added.
“There’s nobody who is a musician in the best-known band in Quebec
of the past 30 years — and an established scientific researcher with
an international reputation.”

Mr. Dupras will be Quebec’s most prominent voice on politically
sensitive scientific issues.

It was by watching his own father that Mr. Dupras first saw the
possibility of a life devoted to art and science. His father played
the double bass in several bands. He also had a career as a
veterinarian specializing in transplanting embryos in livestock — a
job that frequently made the family move across Quebec during Mr.
Dupras’s earliest years.

When he was 7 years old, his family settled in L’Assomption, a
distant suburb northeast of Montreal. In the 1980s, before urban
sprawl reached the outer suburbs, swathes of L’Assomption were still
forests or farms. There, an uncle who was a medical doctor owned a
farm where Mr. Dupras went to work every summer.

“I’d go there every day on my bike to help out my uncle, and at
the end of the summer, he’d give me 50 dollars,” Mr. Dupras
recalled.

In his teens, he witnessed L’Assomption’s untouched areas
gradually vanish.

_Mr. Dupras, right, performs with Les Cowboys Fringants at the Paléo
Festival in Nyon, Switzerland, in 2019. Credit...Lionel
Flusin/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images_

“I’m not against development,” he said. “But every time I saw
that natural environment disappear — in the places I went to play on
my bike with my friends — there was also a part of me that
disappeared.”

In his teens, he grew to love organic chemistry and the bass. He was
invited to join Les Cowboys Fringants, which had been formed by three
other teenagers from the adjoining suburbs. True to their roots, the
band wrote and sang about the small tragedies of ordinary people and
the evanescence of life, finding beauty in Montreal’s outer suburbs
the way Bruce Springsteen did in New Jersey.

The band’s musical style mixed the American grunge and punk rock
they heard in school hallways — Nirvana and Green Day were
favorites, Mr. Dupras said — with Quebec chansons, as well as
instruments of Quebec folk music like the accordion and the fiddle.

Their songs captured the anticlimactic melancholy of a Quebec that had
lived through sweeping changes starting in the 1960s. The province’s
French Québécois had largely moved away from the all-powerful Roman
Catholic Church, leading to the creation of a modern, secular Quebec.
Its political leaders built a giant hydroelectric system that powered
the province’s economy, as well as modern educational and health
systems that became the cornerstones of the province’s social
democracy. Amid these transformations, some French Québécois dreamed
of Quebec’s independence from the rest of Canada.

 

 

 
 
 
 

View this post on Instagram
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A post shared by Les Cowboys Fringants (@lescowboysfringants)
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Mr. Dupras was born a year before Quebec held its first referendum on
independence in 1980 and was a teenager when it held its second in
1995. Both times, the “yes” side lost.

“That dream of building through a collective vision for society, we
felt it crumbling,” Mr. Dupras said. “That was reflected in some
of our songs. We were no longer able to build, no longer able to dream
together.”

Les Cowboys Fringants criticized a Quebec society that had become
content with consumer culture in a 2002 hit called “En berne,” or
“Half-Mast.” In “Lettre à Lévesque,” or “Letter to
Lévesque,” their disillusionment extended to the new generation of
“career-minded” and “opportunistic” politicians.

Mr. Dupras’s influence on the band’s message was felt most acutely
through its early focus on environmental issues. One of their most
haunting songs, “Plus Rien,” or “Nothing Left,” in 2004, told
the story of the last human being on an earth destroyed by
environmental degradation.

Les Cowboys Fringants, or the Dashing Cowboys, have tackled themes
such as environmental destruction and consumerism in their songs.

At one of the band’s last concerts, some 90,000 fans gathered in
Quebec City three summers ago in an emotional outpouring as the lead
singer, Karl Tremblay, performed while visibly weakened by cancer. The
band has not performed since Mr. Tremblay’s death in late 2023, its
future uncertain.

The band’s success took Mr. Dupras in his early 20s on tours across
Quebec as well as to France, Belgium and Switzerland. At the same
time, he studied biochemistry as an undergraduate and earned multiple
advanced degrees in geography. During a trip to Costa Rica, the
country’s management of its natural resources impressed him so much
that he turned to the field of ecological economics, which views the
human economy as part of a finite biosphere.

Led by Mr. Dupras, Les Cowboys Fringants established a private
foundation that allocates parts of the band’s profits to planting
trees, protecting high-value ecological areas, and other environmental
causes. Mr. Dupras felt the need to move beyond the social criticism
of the band’s songs.

“We felt the risk of slipping into cynicism: We were professional
critics and we weren’t offering any solutions,” he said. The
foundation “was our way of solving the equation. It was our way to
respond to criticism — by being positive and by using this as a
springboard for positive action.”

Science, Mr. Dupras was confident, could be used for positive action.
His message would remain the same in his new position as chief
scientist, he said, even though its tone had softened.

Gone were the harsh descriptions of political leaders found in
“Lettre à Lévesque.” He said he wasn’t planning to “lecture
them on what was good or bad.” He now spoke of bringing the best
possible scientific information to people who were “democratically
elected.”

“The person I was 20 years ago would completely understand the
current situation,” he said. “There’s no disconnect.”

NORIMITSU ONISHI [[link removed]] reports
on life, society and culture in Canada. He is based in Montreal.

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FDA APPROVES FIRST MRNA FLU VACCINE FOR OLDER ADULTS
[[link removed]]RACHEL
NANIAAARPPeople 50 and older have another option for their annual
influenza shotAugust 06, 2026

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