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 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.
“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.
“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 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.”
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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