Race Overview

The 2022 BC Liberal leadership race followed Andrew Wilkinson's resignation two days after the October 24, 2020 election, after leading the party to its worst showing since 1991 — dropping from 41 to 28 seats as the NDP under John Horgan won a majority government. Shirley Bond, a six-term MLA and former cabinet minister, was elected interim leader by caucus on November 23, 2020. The leadership vote was set for February 5, 2022, with online and telephone voting running from February 3 to 5.

Kevin Falcon — a former deputy premier and cabinet minister returning to politics after a decade in the private sector — won on the fifth ballot with 52.20% of points and 62 of 87 ridings. Ellis Ross finished second with 33.66% and 22 ridings, while Michael Lee held third place with 14.14% and 3 ridings. Approximately 24,000 ballots were cast from roughly 43,000 members. Seven candidates qualified, though conservative commentator Aaron Gunn had been blocked from running by the party's organizing committee. Results were announced at the Sheraton Wall Centre in Vancouver.

Rules and Process

The race used a ranked preferential ballot with a points-per-riding system. Each of British Columbia's 87 provincial ridings was allocated 100 points, distributed proportionally based on each candidate's share of the vote within that riding — for a total of 8,700 available points. Members ranked candidates in order of preference. After each round of counting, the candidate with the fewest points was eliminated and their supporters' next preferences redistributed, continuing until one candidate exceeded 50% of total points. Five rounds were required before Falcon crossed the threshold.

Entry requirements included a $1,000 application fee plus $45,000 in candidate fees. The membership cutoff to vote was December 17, 2021. Four debates were held between September 2021 and January 2022: a virtual debate on September 28, followed by debates on November 22 and December 14, and a final debate on January 18, 2022.

Aaron Gunn, a conservative commentator, was blocked from running in October 2021 after the party's organizing committee determined his views were inconsistent with the party's commitment to reconciliation and diversity. The decision became a flashpoint — Gunn subsequently helped engineer a conservative takeover of the BC Conservative Party board, foreshadowing the fracture that would later consume BC Liberal politics. A court challenge by party member Vikram Bajwa sought to delay results over concerns about the audit of more than 20,000 new memberships, but a judge rejected the petition and the vote proceeded as scheduled.

Candidates

Kevin Falcon

Born in 1963 on the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia, Falcon attended Vancouver College on a tuition waiver due to his family's low income. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Simon Fraser University and a Real Estate Broker Diploma from the University of British Columbia. Before entering politics, he founded Access Group, a communications consultancy, and served as lead organizer of the Total Recall campaign to recall NDP MLAs in 1999.

Falcon was first elected to the BC legislature in 2001 as the MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale, winning three consecutive elections. He served in a succession of senior cabinet posts: Minister of State for Deregulation, Minister of Transportation — where he oversaw major infrastructure projects including the Canada Line and the Port Mann Bridge replacement — Minister of Health Services, and finally Minister of Finance and Deputy Premier under Christy Clark. He ran for the leadership in 2011, narrowly losing to Clark in the third round by a 48-52 margin. He left politics in August 2012, citing the birth of his second daughter, and joined Anthem Properties as Executive Vice-President.

Falcon declared his candidacy on May 17, 2021, running as the establishment frontrunner with the most caucus endorsements — approximately a dozen MLAs, including Todd Stone and Mike Morris, along with former Surrey mayor Dianne Watts. He made renaming the party a central plank of his campaign. He led from the first ballot with 47.37% of points and won 62 of 87 ridings in every round, finishing with 52.20% — 4,541 of 8,700 points.

Ellis Ross

Born June 16, 1965, in Kitimat, British Columbia, Ross grew up on the Haisla Nation reserve in Kitamaat Village, the second youngest of seven children. He graduated from Mount Elizabeth Secondary School in 1984 and worked as a hand-logger, beachcomber, construction worker, and water-taxi driver before entering Indigenous governance. He became the first full-time Haisla Nation councillor in 2003 and negotiated a $50 million agreement with Kitimat LNG in 2006. He served as Chief Councillor of the Haisla Nation from 2011 to 2017, during which time he received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and the Order of British Columbia for his work on Indigenous economic development.

Ross was elected MLA for Skeena in 2017. He was the first to declare his candidacy on February 18, 2021, running on resource development, LNG expansion, and Indigenous economic prosperity. He campaigned as a grassroots outsider and was strongest in northern British Columbia, rural ridings, and parts of Vancouver Island. He won 21 to 22 ridings in every round and finished second with 33.66% of points — 2,928 of 8,700.

Michael Lee

Born circa 1965 in Vancouver, the son of Hong Kong immigrants, Lee earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, followed by a Master of Arts in Political Science from UBC and a law degree from the University of Victoria. He practiced as a business lawyer in the resource sector, becoming a partner at Lawson Lundell LLP.

Lee was elected MLA for Vancouver-Langara in 2017 and had previously run for the BC Liberal leadership in 2018, finishing third as a first-term MLA. He declared his candidacy on June 9, 2021, running as a moderate, policy-focused candidate. He held his home riding of Vancouver-Langara throughout all five rounds and picked up a third riding in round four after Gavin Dew's elimination. He finished with 14.14% of points — 1,230 of 8,700.

Val Litwin

Litwin was based on Vancouver Island and had co-founded Extreme Kindness, a cross-Canada volunteerism project, as a University of Victoria student. He served as VP Operations at Nurse Next Door, then as CEO of the Whistler Chamber of Commerce and later CEO of the BC Chamber of Commerce, representing over 36,000 businesses. He declared his candidacy on June 22, 2021, running as a renewal candidate from outside the legislature. He never won a single riding across four rounds. In round three, he narrowly outlasted Gavin Dew — 536 to 530 points — but was eliminated in round four with 628 points.

Gavin Dew

Born January 1, 1984, in British Columbia, Dew earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from UBC and an MBA from Oxford University. He worked in corporate strategy and external relations, including roles at Great Canadian Gaming Corporation and on a $5 billion agricultural innovation project. He had previously run as a BC Liberal candidate in the 2016 Vancouver-Mount Pleasant by-election. He declared his candidacy on March 31, 2021. He won only Vancouver-Mount Pleasant in rounds one and two before being eliminated in round three with 530 points, narrowly behind Litwin.

Renee Merrifield

Merrifield was founder and CEO of Troika Group, a Kelowna-based development firm, and had been named three times by the Women's Executive Network as one of Canada's top 100 most powerful women. She was elected MLA for Kelowna-Mission in the 2020 election. She won only her home riding in rounds one and two before being eliminated in round two with 289 points.

Stan Sipos

Sipos was a Victoria-based real estate developer and president of Cielo Properties with more than 40 years of experience building thousands of homes. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, he came to Canada as a young boy. He declared his candidacy on November 24, 2021, as the last entrant. He never won a riding and was eliminated in round one with 105 points.

Campaign and Debates

The race was shaped by a fundamental question about the BC Liberal Party's identity. Since the 1990s, the party had functioned as a free enterprise coalition uniting both federal Liberal and federal Conservative supporters against the NDP. The 2020 defeat cracked that coalition wide open. Should the party move explicitly rightward to recapture conservative voters drifting toward the nascent BC Conservatives, or should it maintain its big-tent centrist positioning?

The Gunn disqualification crystallized this tension. His exclusion on diversity grounds signaled the party establishment's preference for the moderate path, but it alienated conservative-leaning members who saw it as ideological gatekeeping. The name change debate ran parallel — Falcon and Litwin argued the "Liberal" label was a liability with conservative voters, while others worried renaming would cost the party its centrist identity.

Policy debates ranged across health care, resource development, and housing affordability. Falcon introduced the idea of for-profit elements in health care delivery. Ross championed aggressive resource extraction and LNG expansion as the path to provincial prosperity, drawing on his experience negotiating energy agreements as Haisla Chief Councillor. Lee positioned himself as the policy-focused moderate, while Litwin and Dew pitched themselves as fresh voices from outside the legislature.

Falcon's dominance was evident from the first ballot. With 47.37% of points and 62 of 87 ridings — a lead that never wavered across five rounds — the race was effectively a contest for second place. The slow redistribution of eliminated candidates' preferences told its own story: support flowed more toward Ross and Lee than toward Falcon, suggesting the non-Falcon vote was more ideologically cohesive than it was strategically coordinated.

Aftermath

Falcon moved quickly on his signature pledge. At the June 2022 party convention in Penticton, delegates passed a resolution to begin the name change process. The membership voted in November 2022 to adopt "BC United" as the new name, approving the change with roughly 80% support. The rebranding was formally unveiled on April 12, 2023, in Surrey. Falcon entered the legislature by winning the Vancouver-Quilchena by-election on April 30, 2022, with nearly 59% of the vote after Wilkinson resigned the seat.

The most consequential early decision of Falcon's leadership, however, was his expulsion of MLA John Rustad from the BC Liberal caucus in August 2022 over Rustad's social media posts questioning climate science. Rustad subsequently became leader of the BC Conservative Party, which within months overtook BC United in polling and emerged as the primary right-of-centre alternative to the NDP — the very outcome the coalition-style BC Liberals had been structured to prevent.