There’s a lot of work ahead for Mike Bernier, who has just taken the reins of B.C.’s newest political party, CentreBC.
The party’s emergence comes after nearly 10 years of the NDP in power, the collapse of the B.C. Liberals, and the election of a new leader for the B.C. Conservatives, who according to Bernier, has made some feel uneasy about that party’s future.
Bernier was announced as the party’s new leader in July. He served as an MLA with the B.C. Liberals from 2013 to 2024, including a stint as the province’s Minister of Education from 2015 to 2017.
In 2024, Bernier ran as an independent following the collapse of BC United, the renamed B.C. Liberals, and was not re-elected. He said he wasn’t planning on returning to politics, but the current political environment reeled him back in.
“Seeing that divisive polarizing politics we’re experiencing so readily across the province, I saw CentreBC and thought that’s where the province needs to go,” Bernier told the Chronicle.
The new party has completed most of the necessary behind-the-scenes work, Bernier said, and now the front-facing work is taking place, like candidate recruitment and policies.
Bernier said work on recruitment is underway, but the party isn’t in a rush, with no election expected until 2028.
“We’re not rushing like the B.C. Conservatives did, where the first person who puts their hand up with an idea, we take them just to have a body. We want to do this right,” he said.
Bernier’s call-out of the Conservatives comes after that party elected new leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay at the end of May, opening the door to a new kind of politics in the province — a kind that Bernier called “extreme ‘culture war’ style” politics.
And he’s not happy with the NDP under David Eby, either. Bernier is hoping to pull more moderate members of both parties into his own.
“With David Eby’s unpopularity and taking things further left, there are a lot of centrist-style NDPers that are contacting me,” he said.
Asked about potential candidates out of Kamloops, Bernier said the city and its ridings have historically been a “temperature gauge” for provincial politics.
“Kamloops has always had great MLAs, great representation,” he said, mentioning his former BC Liberal colleagues Peter Milobar, Todd Stone and Terry Lake.
“It’s been very progressive in a lot of ways, which kind of aligns more to a party like ours. I’ve never seen it as one that would support polarized or extreme values or views.”
Stone and Milobar were both elected under the B.C. Liberal banner and were present during its transition to BC United, but following that party’s collapse, only Milobar joined the Conservatives, with Stone opting not to run again.
Milobar, however, ran for the leadership of his new party and was eliminated in the first round of voting following a contentious leadership race that saw personal attacks against him by Findlay.
“At the end of the day, I think every MLA elected right now is going to have to take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves why they got into politics,” Bernier said.
“Are the values and this extreme ‘culture war’ style politics that they are involved in now, is this what they can support, or should they consider something else?”
Bernier stopped short of naming names, calling it early days in the party’s recruitment process, but did say that he has found many who feel they are “politically homeless.”
“There are conversations taking place, we’ll just say that,” he said.
“We’ve got people right across the political spectrum, and MLAs, who are obviously not happy with where they’re at, considering their futures.”