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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.

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