People who been told that the Reform Party consists of well-meaning simpletons mouthing naive solutions to complex problems should study Harper's spe… - Preston Manning

This not to say that the Reform Party appears to be the Canadian equivalent of the Republican Party or that I am trying to pass myself off as a modern-day Lincoln.

The communications challenge faced by reform movements the world over and illustrated by this incident is this: in the modern communications business, particularly in the case of television, negative is more newsworthy than positive; short term is more newsworthy than long term; disagreement is more newsworthy than agreement; emotion-laden critiques are more newsworthy than well reasoned proposals for constructive change; discord, threats to order, and bad government are much more newsworthy than peace, order, and good government.

The founders of the CCF were called communists. And Social Credit was frequently portrayed as a dangerous mixture of monetary unorthodoxy, religious fundamentalism, and grassroots fascism. It therefore came as no surprise tha the Reform Party was labelled, particularly in the early stages, as "fringe", "extremely right wing", potentially racist, and seperatist.