Federal Conservatives were outraged this week when Finance Minister Bill Morneau threw an N-word in their direction.

“Neanderthals” was the word in question and it came after Morneau was being accused of failing to walk the government’s talk on gender equality.

“I actually find your line of questioning to be offensive,” Morneau told the Conservatives’ deputy leader, Lisa Raitt. “We will drag along the Neanderthals who don’t agree with that and that will be our continuing approach.”

Within a day, Conservatives were demanding apologies and churning up outrage across social media. Morneau, their favourite target of 2017, was back in their sights as a “mansplainer” to women politicians.

We’ve come a long way from four years ago, when Justin Trudeau was using a much different N-word to describe Conservatives.

It was in February 2014, at the first big Liberal convention after Trudeau took over the leadership of his then third-place party.

“People in Ottawa talk about the ‘Conservative base’ as if it is some angry mob to be feared,” Trudeau told his troops. “They’re wrong. As all of you know, the 5.8 million Canadians who voted Conservative aren’t your enemies. They’re your neighbours.”

No one would accuse the Liberals and Conservatives of neighbourly relations these days, unless we’re talking about fences and feuding families.

But that four-year-old idea of Liberals and Conservatives as neighbours has been on my mind over the past few weeks, as we’ve seen Trudeau’s opinion ratings on a downward slide and Conservatives on an upswing.

If Trudeau is wearing thin on some people, as the pollsters keep telling us, what exactly is the problem? Conservatives are saying that Canadians are simply coming to their senses and recognizing the politician they always said he was — shallow and unready for office. But if it takes five years for Conservative attack ads to work, the party might want to think about switching advertising firms.

My theory (admittedly based on anecdotes) is that some voters may be getting tired of hearing how good the Liberals say they are — all those boasts about how feminist they are, their brave resistance to racism, about how good and decent they are. It’s a government pitched 24-7 on earnest.

Just as constant anger can be exhausting, so can perpetual virtue. Most people, I’d suggest, would remember Stephen Harper’s years in power as angry ones — a government permanently aggrieved about something or other. Neighbours? Maybe, but often more of the “get off my lawn” variety.

Is it any better, though, to be a neighbour who always seems to be talking about how great he or she is?

So sure, Conservatives in power might have resembled Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, but Trudeau’s Liberals in power might also want to watch that they don’t turn into Ned Flanders in The Simpsons.

For those unfamiliar with that long-running show, Flanders is the annoyingly cheerful, virtuous guy who lives next door, a constant reminder of how imperfect the Simpsons are. “Sorry” is one of Flanders’s favourite board games. In one Simpsons episode, Flanders even runs into his Canadian counterpart in a Winnipeg parking lot and proclaims that he “loves the cut of his gibberish.”

Back in 2014, it was a good idea for Trudeau and the Liberals to start thinking of Conservatives as neighbours — as people with whom they would have to find common ground. They might want to keep that in mind again as the next election looms ever closer.

Being a good neighbour definitely means turning down the anger and keeping to a minimum all that yelling on the front porch. But it also means avoiding moral superiority, seeing rivals as “Neanderthals” or worse N-words. (”Nazis” get thrown around on social media from time to time.)

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Ned Flanders isn’t anyone’s idea of a perfect neighbour either.

sdelacourt@bell.net

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