More David Emerson, and tin-foil hat territory.

There's something that's been bugging me lately (and, no, the cream didn't help but thanks for asking). Consider the following:

Just two days before the federal election, Liberal MP David Emerson offered this warning to voters who were tempted to vote Conservative:

"Just mark my words. If they get elected, they are going to begin a massive review of programs and a massive set of cuts. ... And people are going to say, `We didn't ask for this. Mr. Harper didn't say this is what he was going to do.'"

So David Emerson is slagging the CPC in the run-up to the actual election. And what's so odd about that? Well, that's a bit weird since, based on the final results in the riding of Vancouver Kingsway, it certainly doesn't seem as if the CPC candidate in that riding represented a legitimate challenge of any kind.

If you read the pre-election predictions for that riding, no one is taking the CPC candidate Kanman Wong very seriously, and the final results bear that out. On the other hand, it's clear that the real fight is between Emerson and the NDP candidate Ian Waddell.

So why is Emerson wasting his time attacking the CPC? Where's the value in that? His fight is clearly with Waddell but he seems obsessed with artificially inflating the threat from Wong. For what reason?

The only rationale I can imagine for this is that Emerson desperately wants to scare the electorate with the possibility of a (thoroughly unlikely) CPC victory, in order to frighten them into strategically voting for him rather than Waddell. Nothing else makes sense -- Wong clearly has little chance of beating out either Emerson or Waddell so why waste any time attacking a harmless candidate?

Thoughts? Suspicions? Wild conjecture?