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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent out a lot of emails last week, each one sounding more needy than the last.

Now we know why: The latest Elections Canada fundraising reports reveal that the first three months of this year were grim for the governing Liberals especially in comparison to their Conservative rivals.

Even without a permanent leader, the Conservatives hauled in nearly double the dollars that the Liberals did from January to the end of March, from an impressive 10,000 more contributors. And thats not even counting the money and the donors being amassed in the Conservative leadership race.

Whoever the Conservative party chooses, their new leader will have access to the millions of dollars their party has been raising, Trudeau (or more likely a Liberal staffer) wrote in one fundraising email pitch last week.

Thats not an exaggeration. The Conservatives raised $5.3 million from about 42,000 contributors in the first quarter of 2017; the Liberals gathered up $2.8 million from roughly 32,000 donors over the same time period.

The entire field of Conservative leadership contenders, meanwhile, managed to wring another $4 million out of Canadians in the first three months of this year. Thats right. Conservative leadership contenders have out-fundraised the entire, governing Liberal Party of Canada so far in 2017.

Liberals might be tempted to write this off as the usual flurry of cash and excitement that surrounds leadership contests. But that wasnt the case four years ago, when the tables were turned and the Liberals were choosing a leader with the Conservatives still in power.

In the first three months of 2013, leading up to the Liberal leadership convention in early April that elected Trudeau, the party raised about $1.7 million. Conservatives raised $4.4 million during that same quarter.Since then, the Conservatives have lost power without, apparently, losing their knack for out-fundraising the Liberals.

One of Trudeaus email appeals last week also made reference to those heady days in 2013 when he assumed the leadership of the party (it seems like yesterday and, also, a long time ago).

Today we find ourselves on that same timeline 30 months before another election campaign in 2019, the email said, urging would-be supporters to deposit their dollars into a new 30-Month Fund.

The fundraising gap with the Conservatives is no doubt the subject of many heateddiscussions in the corridors of federal power. Is this just a temporary blip, the doldrums of power or an early warning about that power in peril?

We also learned this week that the Liberal government is planning to introduce legislation soon to govern fundraising by political parties and leadership contestants another sign that this business of pulling in cash is much on the minds of the Trudeau crewthese days.

We will be bringing forward legislation to give Canadians information about fundraisers involving cabinet ministers, party leaders, and leadership contestants. Canadians will know about the events in advance, where they are being held, the cost to attend, and they will know who attended them, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould told the Commons on Monday. Goulds office wasnt offering any more information beyond promising that details would be coming soon.

The legislation is obviously a response, at least in part, to the controversy over so-called cash-for-access Liberal events that dominated the Commons for much of last fall.

If youre wondering whether thats a possible explanation for the dip in Liberal fundraising fortunes well, do the math. In the last three months of 2016, the Liberals raised $5.8 million from about 46,000 contributors, compared to $4.6 million for the Conservatives and their 36,000 donors.

Its quite possible that the drip-drip-drip of news stories about the Liberals fundraising events late last year left people with the impression that the party was rolling in dough, and thus not in dire need of citizens contributions. Or potential donors may have decided not to reward what they saw as bad behaviour.

We probably shouldnt ignore the Donald Trump effect either. Trumps surprise election victory last November may have helped Liberals in the immediate term late in 2016, with shell-shocked progressives keen to contribute to any cause seen as anti-Trump.

But theres also no doubt that, over the longer term, Trumps victory has given a jolt of adrenaline to conservative-leaning folks a sign that progressive parties can be defeated.

Trudeaus Liberals, well remember, have been working closely for years with Democrats in the United States, trading tips on raising funds and building support. That alliance doesnt look half as clever in 2017 as it did before the U.S. election; the plummet in Liberals contributions may be a sign that theyre in need of new inspiration and new tactics.

And what was Trudeau doing for much of the first three months of this year? He was paying attention to Trump, trying to stay on the presidents good side and preserve Canadas special relationship with the United States. Perhaps this single-minded focus on the United States was off-putting to potential Liberal donors and the support that Trudeau had cultivated on the progressive left.

There are a variety of other, more domestic reasons for the fundraising decline, too. Between the last quarterly report and the latest one, Trudeaus expensive vacations were in the news. It might be hard to argue now that the leader needs money when hes jetting off to private islands.

One also cant rule out the possibility that Trudeau probably cost himself some support by breaking his electoral-reform promise in early 2017 (Ive heard from Liberal voters who cut their contributions for that reason alone).

Whatever the reason, this latest fundraising report will be casting a shadow over sunny-ways politics. Somehow, I suspect well be seeing a lot more emails from Justin Trudeau in the next fundraising quarter.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the authors alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The Liberals are losing the money war. Should they panic? - iPolitics.ca (subscription)

The Democratic Party is in serious trouble. It has lost more than 900 state legislative seats, 12 governorships, 69 House seats and 13 Senate seats over the last decade, and a recent poll indicates that it has a lower approval rating than President Donald Trump.

To right this political ship, it must recapture pro-life liberals such as my mother, who was a loyal Democrat until 1996, when President Bill Clinton vetoed the bill banning partial-birth abortions.

The party lost her. And although it never lost me, it sure has done its best to push me out along with all the other pro-life Democrats in the United States, some 20 million in number.

Abortion activists claim that the fetus is just a mass of tissue, and that women are too weak to succeed without abortion. Not only do pro-life Democrats accept the settled science that shows the prenatal child is a human organism, we know that with the right support, women are more than up to the challenge of difficult or unplanned pregnancies.

We also support a living wage, Medicare, paid family leave, affordable child care and worker protections provided by strong unions. And we strongly resist a small-government Republican Party that refuses to support women and mothers.

Yet because of our views on abortion, many of us are intimidated into silence. Indeed, we get stronger pushback from Democratic leadership than from Republicans.

I first saw this dynamic in 1990, when I moved to Minnesota and pro-lifers were shouted down at the first Democratic caucus I attended. But I felt it most acutely when I ran for Congress in 2002. Planned Parenthoods executive director spread falsehoods about my position on government funding for contraceptives. Party activists I had worked with only months before explained that they couldnt vote for me or donate to my campaign. Even my Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee team hid my pro-life stance.

As a result, the following year, I joined Democrats for Life of America. Ive since learned that a large number of Democratic legislators hide their pro-life positions in order to get endorsed and raise money. Many others are under tremendous pressure to stay silent, including Muslims, women of color and, yes, members of the white working class.

The partys leadership, located largely in pro-choice bubbles on the coasts, claims that support for abortion is a political winner. This is simply not true. Tellingly, women support restrictions on late-term abortion at higher rates than men.

Democratic politicians shouldnt make sweeping statements about what the country believes without paying careful attention to regions. While polls consistently show that Americans are pretty evenly divided on abortion, opposition in the Midwest and South is higher than the national average.

If the Democratic Party is to become a truly national party one that can win consistently outside of urban, coastal America it has no choice but to welcome people with different views on abortion. The number of voters who cite abortion as their single-most-important issue is the highest in the history of Gallups poll. This group is dominated by pro-lifers.

Thankfully, after the Trump election, Democratic leaders seem to understand that they have a crisis on their hands. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez undertook a unity tour with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., with both leaders acknowledging that any political math for a 50-state strategy must include pro-life Democrats. And although NARAL and other pro-choice inquisitors pounced on Perez and got him to retract his position, a principle of openness to pro-lifers has been reiterated by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

During the 2016 campaign, Sanders rightly pointed out that Planned Parenthood belongs to the establishment, implying that a litmus test on abortion would not be required by the new, exciting, growing edge of the party. There is a legitimate debate about abortion to have within the party, but the progressive Sanders wing is wise to separate the toxicity of that argument from the partys central goals.

If the Democratic Party needs a litmus test, it should be economic justice and civil rights for all. The pro-life Democrat Hubert Humphrey said it best: The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Tribune Content Agency

Janet Robert is a founder of Progressive Talk Radio AM 950 Minneapolis and president of Democrats for Life of America. This was written for the Los Angeles Times.

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Do not use any of my hard-earned tax dollars to support abortions

How Missouri added insult to the pain of my abortion

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Democrats should welcome pro-life liberals - Chicago Tribune

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This is a moment of extreme hyperbole in America, with words like "fascism" and "Russian coup" mixing in seamlessly in our superlative-heavy political discourse with "creeping sharia" and "Mexican invasion." But perhaps no phrase is deployed as recklessly as "hate speech," a nebulous non-legal term of which there is no agreed-upon definition.

While neither red nor blue America has a monopoly on trying to use the force of government or the violence of the citizenry to silence its opponents, the idea that the most vulnerable among us can be protected from the wounds of "hate speech" through loopholes in the First Amendment has been gaining disquieting momentum among liberal thinkers who should really know better.

Howard Dean recently demonstrated his mangled misunderstanding of Supreme Court jurisprudence when he followed up a widely mocked tweet asserting hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment with later tweets and media appearances in which he repeatedly cited a Supreme Court decision that deemed certain speech to constitute "fighting words." The physician and former DNC chair was arguing that conservative gadfly Ann Coulter's well-worn shtick constitutes both "hate speech" and "fighting words," and is therefore not constitutionally protected.

That is simply nonsense.

"Hate speech" as a legal concept does not exist, which is a good thing, because hate is subjective and anything from the most vile forms of bigotry to opposition to abortion to support for gay rights to criticism of religious institutions have all been deemed beyond the pale of public discourse by various groups and individuals. Offensiveness lies in the eye of the beholder. Thankfully, the right to express offensive ideas persists.

To be clear, there are jerks out there who have no desire to engage in good faith debating and who profit off of deliberately causing offense, the receipt of which only makes them more popular with their audiences. They promote noxious ideas and stand on "free speech" the way a child would claim to be standing on "base" in a backyard game of tag. Coulter is one of these jerks, and one only needs to recall the outrage she helped stoke over a Muslim community center opening a few blocks from the World Trade Center back in 2010 to be aware of how little she truly values free speech, freedom of religion, and private property rights when she and her comrades demanded the "Ground Zero mosque" be stopped.

These characters might not "deserve" free speech, but they are entitled to it. Rights are not earned by the righteousness of one's values. They're just rights. And the right to freedom of expression is the tool that cultivated the fight to win every civil right in this country's history. There is no civil rights movement, no gay rights movement, no feminist movement, and no anti-war movement without broad free speech protections for unpopular expression.

The good isn't safe unless the bad is, too.

Considering the former governor of Vermont made his name on the national stage as the most strident anti-war candidate of the 2004 presidential campaign, it's particularly ironic that Howard Dean would cite Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire, a case centering around a Jehovah's Witness named Walter Chaplinsky who had been passing out anti-WWII materials, attracted a hostile crowd, and then was arrested after a town marshal deemed him to be the cause of the unrest. What "fighting words" did Chaplinsky utter? He called the marshal "a damned fascist."

Never mind the details of the case or how many anti-war protesters have used that other "f word" to describe any number of people both in and out of government. Dean's citing of Chaplinsky ignores the history of the Supreme Court repeatedly clarifying and narrowing the definition of "fighting words," as well as the fact that the Court has never cited the case as a precedent to curtail freedom of speech. In fact, some legal scholars even consider the fighting words exception to be for all intents and purposes a pile of dead letters, if not explicitly overturned by the Court.

Though Dean would like to believe Coulter's tasteless musing about wishing Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had instead targeted The New York Times is unprotected speech, it is. Like a great deal of Coulter's output, it is mean-spirited and if intended as a joke of miniscule satirical value. But the right to speech does not require a value test. And yet, a value test is exactly what was advocated in The New York Times recently by NYU vice provost and professor Ulrich Baer:

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. [The New York Times]

This appears to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy on the part of Baer, because the freedom of speech requires no "balance" or "obligation to ensure" anything, primarily because someone would have to determine when sufficient "balance" had been achieved. Who does Baer think should be the arbiters of such balance? Why, right-thinking administrators like himself, who breathlessly determine that "there is no inherent value to be gained from debating" certain ideas in public.

Australian professor Robert Simpson, in a recent article at Quartz, also advocated for benevolent authority figures separating "good speech" from "bad speech." After cursory nods to the value of the right to free expression unencumbered by government interference or violent mobs ("Free speech is important However, once we extrapolate beyond the clear-cut cases, the question of what counts as free speech gets rather tricky"), Simpson argues for putting "free 'speech' as such to one side, and replace it with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties."

Like Baer and Dean, Simpson assumes that those in power will always be as right-thinking as he, and that if the price of squashing the Ann Coulters of the world is abandoning the principle of universal free speech so long as it doesn't rise to direct threats or incitement to violence, well, that's a price they're willing to pay.

Erstwhile anti-war presidential candidates and distinguished professors should know better than to put their faith in authority when it comes to the competition of ideas. That they don't shows how little faith they have in the ability of the "good" to beat the "bad." Call me a hopeless optimist, but the value of robust free speech especially the right to offend has helped to facilitate the changing of minds regarding civil rights and has helped end or stop wars. That's why free speech, and not well-meaning censorship, will continue to be perhaps our greatest bulwark to tyranny.

This country has seen bigger threats to the republic than Ann Coulter and her ilk, and we should resist the urge to use state power or approvingly wink at masked, firework-wielding LARPers from creating "security threats" that prevent her from plugging a book to a few dozen young Republicans and a few hundred protesters on a college campus.

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Liberals' free-speech amnesia - The Week Magazine

One reason they dont is that some of what those congregations offer is already embodied in liberal politics and culture. As the sociologist N. J. Demerath argued in the 1990s, liberal churches have suffered institutional decline, but also enjoy a sort of cultural triumph, losing members even as their most distinctive commitments ecumenical spirituality and a progressive social Gospel permeate academia, the media, pop culture, the Democratic Party.

But this equilibrium may not last, and it may not deserve to. The campus experience of late suggests that liberal Protestantism without the Protestantism tends to gradually shed the liberalism as well, transforming into an illiberal cult of victimologies that burns heretics with vigor. The wider experience of American politics suggests that as liberalism de-churches it struggles to find a nontransactional organizing principle, a persuasive language of the common good. And the experience of American society suggests that religious impulses without institutions arent enough to bind communities and families, to hold atomization and despair at bay. . . .

Do it for your friends and neighbors, town and cities: Thriving congregations have spillover effects that even anti-Trump marches cant match.

Do it for your family: Church is good for health and happiness, its a better place to meet a mate than Tinder, and even its most modernized form is still an ark of memory, a link between the living and the dead.

I understand that theres the minor problem of actual belief. But honestly, dear liberals, many of you do believe in the kind of open Gospel that a lot of mainline churches preach.

If pressed, most of you arent hard-core atheists: You pursue religious experiences, you have affinities for Unitarianism or Quakerism, you can even appreciate Christian orthodoxy when its woven into Marilynne Robinson novels or the Letter From Birmingham Jail.

You say youre spiritual but not religious because you associate religion with hierarchies and dogmas and strict rules about sex. But the Protestant mainline has gone well out of its way to accommodate you on all these points.

I appreciate that by staying away from church youre vindicating my Catholic skepticism of that accommodation but really, arent you being a little ungrateful, a little slothful, a little selfish by leaving these churches empty when theyre trying to be exactly the change you say you wish Christianity would make?

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Shouldn't liberals be going to liberal churches? - Patheos (blog)

The BC Liberals say they stand corrected after falsely accusing a retired civil servant of being an NDP plant after she encountered Leader Christy Clark in a grocery store and told her shed never vote for her.

However, the party did not issue an apology to Linda Higgins, which some have been calling for after last weeks encounter. The incident, captured by TV news crews inside a store in North Vancouver, sparked its own hashtag on social media, #IamLinda, which critics used to vent their own reasons for never supporting Ms. Clark.

On Tuesday, after days of controversy, the Liberals issued a statement that said: Were happy to stand corrected, though the party did not elaborate, despite a request to do so.

The statement cited Ms. Clarks previous statement that we are fortunate to live in a democracy where respectful disagreement is possible, though it did not include any apology to Ms. Higgins or express any contrition.

Ms. Higgins told The Globe and Mail that she was in North Vancouver last Thursday having had lunch with her husband. When Ms. Clarks leadership tour arrived for some mainstreeting, Ms. Higgins decided she wanted to talk to the Liberal leader about her concerns about education policy, housing affordability and other issues.

The face-to-face chat was brief.

I would never vote for you because of what Ms. Higgins said.

Ms. Clark cut her off. You dont have to thats why we live in a democracy. She then walked away.

Ms. Higgins has denied she was there at the behest of the NDP.

As the hashtag took off, campaign director Laura Miller suggested on Twitter that Ms. Higgins was sent by the NDP to disrupt Ms. Clarks campaign.

Several party officials shared Ms. Millers post, while Sam Oliphant, a former press secretary to Ms. Clark who now works on the campaign, also used a tweet to question Ms. Higgins allegiances.

The party initially refused to say anything about the encounter or whether it stood by the claims about Ms. Higgins, a 61-year-old former social-worker assistant.

Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Ms. Clark declined to answer questions about whether the party had any evidence to justify claims by senior Liberal officials or why the party would not apologize.

Youll have to speak to the people that tweeted that out, Ms. Clark said. I dont have the answer to that. What I am spending my time talking about while I am out here is what I stand for and what I believe in and our plan for the province.

Ms. Higgins told The Globe that an apology would have little value because it would not be sincere, but rather forced by the pressure that the Liberals have come under over the situation.

In a statement, NDP Leader John Horgan said Ms. Clark has even made up some details about her encounter with Ms. Higgins that are disproved by video of the meeting. After the encounter, Ms. Clark told reporters Ms. Higgins said she didnt vote for her previously, had never voted Liberal and would not vote for again. The suggestion is disputed by video of the encounter.

Mr. Horgan said the discrepancy is typical of Ms. Clarks approach to such disputes.

When Christy Clark gets into trouble, she just makes stuff up, Mr. Horgan said in the statement. I think she owes Linda an apology.

Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver said, on Tuesday, the lack of an apology to Ms. Higgins by either the Liberals or their leader has sustained the controversy.

Mr. Weaver said there was nothing wrong with Ms. Higgins initial comment nor Ms. Clarks response, which he described as fair, although it was done a bit flippantly.

However, he said the Liberals went too far thereafter.

When they accused this woman of being a spy, they crossed the line, he said.

Its not the first time Ms. Clark and the BC Liberals have been under fire for making false allegations. In February, Ms. Clark apologized after accusing the NDP of hacking the BC Liberal Party website. Her allegation came after a party document was sent to a journalist.

Follow Ian Bailey on Twitter: @ianabailey

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BC Liberals take back claim woman was NDP plant in #IamLinda debacle - The Globe and Mail