FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, JULY 31, 2026, VANCOUVER, B.C. — Two parties are dragging British Columbia toward the extremes. One can’t balance a budget or handle a land title crisis without leaking its own private meetings to the press. The other just elected a leader who wants to fight culture wars most of us have no interest in. I stepped up to lead CentreBC because British Columbians deserve better than a choice between chaos and extremism.

I honestly wasn’t looking to get back into politics. After more than a decade in the legislature, six years as mayor of Dawson Creek, and a career in the oil and gas industry before that, I was enjoying time with my wife, my kids, and my eight grandkids. I figured my days of public life were behind me. Then I started paying closer attention to what’s happening in this province, and I couldn’t sit still any longer.

On one side, we have an NDP government that has lost control of the province’s finances and its own agenda. This year’s budget delivered a record $13.3 billion deficit, on top of a mountain of debt that has been climbing for years. On the file of Indigenous land rights and title, the government has instead lurched from private meetings to leaked transcripts to walked back promises. Nobody, on either side of the issue, feel like they’ve been treated with respect or told the truth. That’s not reconciliation–that’s chaos dressed up as progress.

It’s no wonder British Columbians are losing patience.

But here’s what worries me just as much. The BC Conservatives just elected a new leader who is dragging that party hard right, further than most British Columbians I know are comfortable with. She has made opposing Indigenous rights and dismantling inclusive education central to her pitch, and she’s proud to say the direction she showed party members during the leadership race is exactly what to expect from her now. That’s her right. But it is not the province most of us want to live in.

So we’re left with a choice between a government that has lost the plot and an opposition moving toward the fringe. I don’t accept that those are the only two options. I felt I could not sit on the sidelines while these two parties pull us further apart and closer to a crisis of trust in our own institutions. It is time to step up and fight for the province we all love, the one that works for everyone, not just the loudest voices on either end.

I want to be clear about something from the outset: I am not interested in fighting culture wars. Not from the left, and not from the right. I’ve spent enough time living in the lower mainland and in rural BC and being in government to know that regular people do not lie awake at night worrying about the fights that dominate social media and question period. The things that keep them awake are worrying about whether they can get a family doctor. Whether their kids will ever afford a home in the community they grew up in. Whether it’s safe to walk downtown at night. Whether their small business can survive another year of rising costs and red tape.

Those are the things CentreBC is going to focus on.

That means fixing a health care system that is leaving too many British Columbians without a doctor and too many rural communities without the staff to keep their hospitals and clinics open. It means tackling the cost of living and housing affordability with real supply, not slogans. It means taking crime and safety on our streets seriously, with the treatment and justice resources to back it up. And it means building an economy where small businesses, the backbone of communities, can thrive, while we protect the land, water, and air we’re going to hand down to our kids and grandkids. These things are not in conflict. We can do both, if we’re willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of governing well instead of governing loudly.

This is what a real centre movement looks like: informed by evidence, honest about complexity, willing to say when something is hard instead of pretending it’s simple, committed to listening meaningfully to stakeholders, developing thoughtful policy, and measuring what works and what doesn’t – all while putting people ahead of partisanship.

I’ve spent my career in rooms with people who disagree with each other, and I’ve learned that most of them are decent people who happen to see things differently. That’s true of New Democrats. It’s true of Conservatives. It’s true of independents and people who’ve never voted before in their life.

British Columbians deserve a party that treats them that way, and that talks to them like adults about the real problems in front of us.

That’s why I stepped up. I hope you’ll join me.

By Mike Bernier, CentreBC 

Mike Bernier is the Leader of CentreBC and a former MLA for Peace River South, former Minister of Education, and former mayor of Dawson Creek.