Former B.C. Liberal cabinet minister Mike Bernier is the new leader of the CentreBC party.
Bernier was a member of the B.C. legislature for 11 years, representing the Liberal party through its rebranding to B.C. United in 2023. He is also the former mayor of Dawson Creek and spent 20 years working in the oil and gas industry.
Founding CentreBC leader Karin Kirkpatrick stepped down in June, triggering a search by the party’s executive council.
Bernier hasn’t been a member of a party since B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon struck a deal with the B.C. Conservatives to withdraw United from the 2024 provincial election, leaving Bernier to run as an Independent.
He lost to Conservative Larry Neufeld in the Peace River South riding.
“As a person who’s more of a fiscal conservative and a social progressive, I felt like there was nowhere for me to go until I started watching CentreBC,” Bernier told Black Press Media on Monday (July 20), two days after taking over as party leader.
He now says he’s fielding calls from people of all political stripes who are disenchanted with the current B.C. political landscape.
Many of these people are federal Liberals who supported Prime Minister Mark Carney’s party in the 2025 election.
“Almost one million people in the province of British Columbia voted federal Liberal, and the majority of them are saying that there’s nowhere provincially for them to vote,” Bernier said.
He says he’s also been taking calls from many federal Liberal organizers who want to come over and help, as well as from sitting MLAs of both of B.C.’s dominant parties.
Bernier said his new party is a home for those in favour of “moderate” governance.
For him, this means listening to and engaging with all sides on Aboriginal rights, backing policies for schools that work for parents and for children who deserve to be free from being bullied because of their sexuality, and doing the hard policy work to fix the health-care system.
“I’ve never seen our healthcare in this state,” he said, calling it “a perfect example of, you throw money at something; it doesn’t fix the problem.”
On Aboriginal affairs, he points out that he was the only MLA who did not vote for the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in 2019, having walked out of the chamber to abstain. He said he did not think it would solve the problems it set out to.
“We need to be working with our First Nations friends and partners in our communities around the province, but we need to be really careful we’re not setting up a situation where it’s a veto,” he said.
Bernier’s take on this and the Cowichan decision, which has spurred a major public debate over Indigenous land rights, is that the NDP failed to make the necessary legal arguments due to fear-based decision-making.
“The NDP are worried about making it look like they’ve picked sides,” he said. “So, they’d rather just drive down the middle of the road, and what we’re seeing now is they’re getting hit by cars going both ways.”
Bernier defended the Sexuality Orientation and Gender Identity-inclusive (SOGI) school policies that he introduced as education minister in 2016.
SOGI policies seek to create an inclusive learning environment for people of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity. This is different than sexual health education, though many critics conflate the two.
School districts have been forced to put out myth-busting fact sheets for parents.
Bernier says many people have deliberately spread misleading information about these policies for political purposes.
“This is a perfect example of the B.C. Conservatives and others using a topic and trying to find a few extreme situations that happened outside what I brought in and use it for polarizing scare tactic politics,” he said.
The B.C. Conservatives issued a news release on Monday that claimed the government had “defunded SOGI.” Education Minister Lisa Beare took to social media to say this was false.
Bernier says these policies were created to train educators to ensure schools are safe.
“To be blunt, I don’t know anybody, personally, who says because a young boy says they might be gay that they deserve to be beat up in schools,” he said. “They need to have a safe place to go as well.”
For now, with two years until the next scheduled election, Bernier plans on working to build the party and find the “right candidates.” At this point, he would not commit to running a candidate in every riding.
But he may try to poach some sitting MLAs along the way.
“There are members in all of the parties, sitting MLAs right now, who have reached out to me because they feel frustrated; they feel they don’t align anymore with the party they represent,” he said.