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Federal Liberals have fired back at two anti-abortion groups embarking on a national campaign to warn Canadians that Justin Trudeau is an "extremist."

On Thursday, the Campaign Life Coalition and Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform announced a cross-country speaking tour dubbed "#No2Trudeau" in protest of the Liberal leader's edict that all Grit MPs after the next election will be pro-choice.

"Justin Trudeau is ignoring and discriminating against the majority of Canadians who support abortion restrictions, by proclaiming they are not welcome to run for the Liberal Party of Canada," said Campaign Life Coalition spokesperson Alissa Golob in a statement.

But on Friday, Liberals launched the hashtag "#Yes2Trudeau" on Twitter, with many supporters and candidates lauding his stance and promoting a petition on the Liberal website in support of a woman's right to choose.

The petition includes space for supporters to add their names, emails, and postal codes all information that could prove valuable in building a voter database before the next election. The site also contains a donation button.

By Friday afternoon, the hashtag was trending in Canada.

Liberals also tweeted a clip from Trudeau's speech in Toronto earlier this week on the topic of liberty, where he addressed the controversy over his pro-choice pledge.

Last spring, Trudeau announced no new candidates with anti-abortion stances would be allowed to run for the party in the next federal election. Incumbent MPs opposed to abortion would also be required to vote pro-choice if the matter comes before the House of Commons.

"For Liberals, the right of a woman to control her body is more important than the right of a legislator to restrict her freedom with their vote, he said. MPs who disagree with that have other choices. They can sit as independents, or as Conservatives."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said last year that Conservative MPs will be allowed to vote their conscience on matters that challenge their morals or religious faith.

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#Yes2Trudeau: Liberals Respond To Anti-Abortion Groups

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has spoken at McGill University and the University of British Columbia in recent weeks. The choice of these locations was not an accident.

If the Liberals are to improve their standing in the scheduled October election, let alone contend to form a government, they have to charge up young Canadians to vote.

Getting Canadians in the 18-to-30 group to the ballot box has proven quite difficult. Young people are turned off by partisan politics. Lower overall voter turnouts in recent elections are largely explained by the precipitous decline in voting among the young. Thats bad news for the Liberals and great news for the Conservatives.

Pollster after pollster has confirmed that the Liberals do better than the other main parties among the young, whereas Conservatives do best among the over-65 set. Since a much higher share of older Canadians than younger ones vote, this gives the Conservatives a big advantage. The future belongs to the young, but the present belongs to the old.

Pollster Angus Reids latest survey on the matter gives the Liberals 34 per cent of voters in the 18-34 age category, compared to 29 per cent for the New Democrats and just 22 per cent for the Conservatives. Among over-55 voters, the Conservatives lead the Liberals 38 to 32 per cent, with the NDP at 22.

Ipsos Reid has the Liberals seven points ahead of the Conservatives among 18-34-year-olds, but the Conservatives lead by four points among voters over 55. Nanos Researchs Party Power Index, which blends voting intentions and prime ministerial preferences, shows the Liberals ahead among 18-to-29-year-olds but trailing among those over 60.

An instructive, albeit small, poll of two Conservative-held ridings (Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette and Brandon-Souris) by Probe Research in Winnipeg found the Liberals ahead by 17 points among 18-34-year-olds, whereas the Conservatives led by 12 points among those over 55.

Getting young people to vote has long flummoxed political parties (especially the Liberals and New Democrats), civic-society activists and political scientists. Mr. Trudeau needs to solve the puzzle.

Younger voters dont see voting as a civic duty, the way many of their elders do. Perhaps they dont yet have a stake in society, and so feel government to be not terribly important. They get their information from nontraditional sources, which are hard to penetrate with political messages.

If some young people are interested in politics, in the widest sense of the word, they may express it by supporting particular causes. Or they may be too wrapped up in their studies or early careers to worry much about the faraway and abstract stuff of politics.

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Trudeau seeks the fountain of youth

When asked if they're happy, political conservatives are more likely to say yes than liberals. But a new study suggests that liberals might be the happier bunch -- and conservatives might just want to look good.

Researchers believe that conservatives may have a reputation for being happy because it's in their nature to talk themselves up.

Previous work on the "happiness gap" between liberals and conservatives took a relatively simple route: Just asking. Study subjects were asked to self-report their own happiness levels. In several academic studies (and one by Pew) conservatives repeatedly came out as generally cheerier than their left-wing countrymen.

[Your brain's response to a gross photo can reveal your political leanings]

The new results, published Thursday in the journal Science, took a different approach. Led bySean Wojcik, a doctoral student in psychology andsocial behavior at the University of California at Irvine, the experiment analyzed photos and language analysis from the LinkedIn and Twitter profiles of those identified as either liberal or conservative.

"Common sense would dictate that if you want to know how happy someone is, you can ask them," saidPeter Ditto, UCI professor of psychology & social behavior and co-author of the paper. "But what do you do if someone says they're happy, but doesn't act that way?"

Indeed, Ditto and Wojcik found more genuine smiles (as measured by standard facial analysis) and more positive language in the Web trail of liberals, even though other members of that group self-reported as less happy in the very same study.

The reason, they say, is that political conservatives have a tendency to self-aggrandize. When they compared happiness self-reports with tests that measured a tendency to enhance one's better qualities, they found that the happiness gap could be explained by a self-enhancement gap. In other words, liberals were being more honest about their personal pitfalls.

"There are two interpretations of this you could make: Either people are happier because this self-enhancement has a positive effect on their lives, or they're just appearing to be happier because of that tendency to self-enhance," Wojcik explained. He believes that a search for positive language and genuine smiles helps suggest that conservatives are in the latter camp.

Of course, this study isn't really any more definitive than the self-reported ones, and Wojcik understands that. If his new method showed the same results as self-reported surveys, it would be another story. "But this does raise more questions than answers," he said.

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Liberals might be happier than conservatives, even if conservatives say otherwise

A new study found that conservative members of Congress used fewer words associated with happiness than did their liberal colleagues. Alex Wong, Getty Images

Republicans may be running the show in Congress but it seems it's the Democrats who are happier.

That's the finding from a wide-ranging study published in Science Thursday examining the happiness of conservatives and liberals. As part of the study, the researchers examined 432 million words in the Congressional Record over the past 18 years as well the "smiling behavior" of politicians in their publicly available photographs from 2013.

Liberal members of Congress used a higher ratio of positive words, such as "interested," "excited," "enthusiastic" and "proud" to negative words, such as "afraid," "upset," "distressed" and "irritable." Those with more conservative beliefs, meanwhile, were less likely to be found beaming in their portraits.

"Conservatism predicted significantly less intense facial action in the muscles around the eyes that indicates genuine happiness," the study found, adding that liberal politicians "smile more intensely and smile more genuinely."

The study expanded beyond politicians to look more broadly at the happiness of conservatives and liberals. Examining 47,257 Twitter status updates from conservatives and liberals as well as 457 photos from LinkedIn, they found a similar pattern.

"Together, our studies found that political liberals exhibited more frequent and intense happiness related behavior than political conservatives," the authors wrote. "Although the effects in these studies were small, they consistently revealed greater happiness-related behavior among liberals, rather than conservatives."

The findings run contrary to earlier studies, mostly from surveys, in which conservatives reported they were happier than liberals. Scientists in those studies credited the upbeat nature of conservatives to their optimism, a sense they are in control of their lives and their "transcendent moral values."

In the latest research, the authors said their findings reflected the limitations of self-reporting in the earlier work. But they also were careful to say that the expressions of happiness they found didn't mean one group of politicians or their supporters were any happier than another nor that this so-called happiness had anything to do with specific events, such as the tenure of President Obama.

"We are quite explicit that we are not arguing that liberals or Democrats are happier - or especially that becoming one will make you happier," the University of California, Irvine's Peter Ditto, a co-author on the study, told CBS News.

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Who are happier, liberals or conservatives?

What does it mean to be happy? Is it how happy you say you are, or is it how happy you act? Previous research has found that political conservatives report being happier than political liberals. But UC Irvine psychologists have discovered that those on the left exhibit happier speech patterns and facial expressions.

"The so-called 'happiness gap' between liberals and conservatives is more complicated than we thought," said Sean Wojcik, a doctoral student in psychology & social behavior at UCI and lead author of the study, which appears this month in Science.

Prior findings that political conservatives are happier than political liberals have been based on self-reports of happiness. But claims about one's happiness -- just like claims about one's intelligence or morality -- can be inflated by the desire to see oneself in a positive light.

"If you want to know how happy someone is, one way to do it is to just ask them, and this logic has been relied upon heavily in research on subjective well-being," said Peter Ditto, UCI professor of psychology & social behavior and co-author of the paper. "But another way to think about it is that happy is as happy does, and looking at happiness-related behavior avoids the issue of someone striving to present him- or herself as a happy person."

To assess differences in happiness-related behavior, Wojcik and his colleagues turned to "big data" sources: online survey takers, American politicians, and Twitter and LinkedIn users with ties to companies or organizations associated with either liberal (Planned Parenthood, for example) or conservative (Fox News) viewpoints.

Specifically, the psychologists analyzed millions of words from Congressional Record transcripts and the photographs of every member of Congress, as well as 47,000 tweets and nearly 500 photos from LinkedIn. They found that contrary to the pattern of greater conservative happiness found in self-report questionnaires, liberals more frequently employed positive language in their speech and writing and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs.

"We were surprised by how consistently happiness-related behavior was predicted by having a liberal political ideology," Wojcik said. "We saw similar patterns of emotional language and smiling behavior among Congress members, Twitter users and LinkedIn users."

These results belie the self-reports of greater happiness among those who lean to the political right, and Wojcik has an explanation. "People tend to report all kinds of traits and abilities in an overly favorable way," he said. "If you ask people to rate themselves across almost any set of positive traits -- intelligence, social skills, even driving ability -- most will rate themselves above average. We observed that effect to be stronger among conservatives than liberals."

But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. "There's research saying that self-enhancement is related to improved social relations, productive and creative work, and other beneficial outcomes," Wojcik noted.

The study was also co-authored by Arpine Hovasapian of UC Irvine, Jesse Graham of the University of Southern California, and Matt Motyl of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Political liberals display greater happiness, study shows