Renowned editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder dropped from Halifax newspaper after 30 years

Renowned editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder has been let go from a historic Halifax newspaper after three decades, but rest assured he won't be putting down his pencil.

De Adder announced he was being dropped by The Chronicle Herald on his social media page earlier this week, garnering thousands of reactions and comments from people both bewildered and disappointed by the decision.

In an interview, de Adder described editorial cartoons as "the soul of the newspaper."

He said the Herald has lost yet another independent voice, one of many that have vanished from publications throughout the country in recent years as they grapple with a shifting media landscape. 

Newspapers these days are "a shadow of their former selves," he said.

"I saw this coming. These days the better you are as a cartoonist, the more you are kind of a threat," de Adder told CBC Radio's Information Morning Moncton.

"There was a time when if a cartoonist got in trouble, a paper would consider that kind of an asset because they were bringing attention to the paper. These days they just don't tolerate it anymore."

De Adder recently came under scrutiny for a cartoon that featured the image of a monkey to illustrate a Halifax mayoral candidate. Candidate Darryl Johnson, who is Black, accused the cartoonist of using racist imagery, but de Adder said he drew the cartoon without considering how it may be received by the Black community and without knowing there was a Black candidate in the race. 

He and Johnson appeared together on CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia this week to discuss the incident and reconcile their perspectives.

De Adder said Thursday he doesn't feel the backlash from that cartoon contributed to the newspaper's decision to let him go.

"During that entire incident, I didn't hear back from the paper and that's not normal," he said, which leads him to believe the decision was already made. "It definitely was bad timing. Let's put it that way."

The Chronicle Herald, which was an independent daily newspaper founded almost 200 years ago, was recently acquired by Toronto-based Postmedia Network Inc. as part of a $1-million deal.

In a statement, Postmedia said it does not comment on "internal personnel matters."

Editorial cartoonist Bruce MacKinnon will still have two cartoons per week in the publication.

De Adder's award-winning career began at the Halifax alternative weekly The Coast. A popular comic strip called Walterworld — which lampooned then mayor of Halifax Walter Fitzgerald — led to freelance jobs at The Chronicle Herald and The Hill Times in Ottawa, his website said.

He has also worked for the former Halifax Daily News and New Brunswick Publishing, where de Adder said on his site that he was let go for political views expressed through his work, including a cartoon depicting U.S. President Donald Trump's border policies. His cartoons have also appeared in The Washington Post and the Toronto Star.

In 2017, he released a book titled You Might Be from Canada If..., described by Nimbus Publishing as "an examination of Canada at 150 by one of the country's great satirists/cartoonists."

De Adder said he was told by officials with Postmedia only a few months ago that he would be "fine."

"But you're never fine in this business," he said. "As newspapers decline, they're doing everything and anything to cut what they perceive as fat, when they're really cutting into bone."

Nevertheless, de Adder urged his supporters not to be concerned about his future, noting he's lost his job a handful of times over the years, referring to himself as a "professional fired person." 

In the short term, he will be posting cartoons on his subscription-based Substack page.

"I'm surprisingly not worried. I've always bounced back. I'll bounce back again," he said.

"An American cartoonist said a while back that when the apocalypse comes, there will only be two things left: cockroaches and Michael de Adder still drawing.