From a 4-day work week to immigration control, Green leadership candidates make their final policy pitches

Candidates for the leadership of the Green Party have been selling their visions for the party's future. On Nov. 19, one of them (or maybe two) will take over.

While some candidates argue leadership contests aren't the right venues for crafting new party policy – something Greens tend to see as the sole purview of members – others have released platform pitches.

With online voting opening today, CBC News spoke with all the candidates to put together this snapshot of what each is offering.

Anna Keenan and Chad Walcott, who are running for co-leadership together, released a platform in November. In a joint interview, the candidates said a Green Party led by them would rise to official party status in the House of Commons and wield the balance of power in the next minority Parliament.

Keenan and Walcott said they would only prop up a minority government if it agreed to advance proportional representation – an electoral system which awards a party a share of seats in Parliament based on the total percentage of votes it received.

The two joint candidates are also are proposing a national ban on fossil fuel projects, a national electric inter-city bus service and the right to a four-day work week for federal workers.

"The four-day work week that we're pitching falls under a larger discussion about the need to move toward a well-being economy," Walcott said. "An economy where we're putting people first and their well-being first, rather than kind of endless profit."

Walcott said the right to a five-day work week was won by labour unions in the U.S. and was quickly embraced by countries around the world, including Canada.

Simon Gnocchini-Messier, based in Gatineau, Que., is running solo. He's calling for an expansion of hydroelectric power generation in his province and a limit to immigration to protect sensitive ecosystems.

Gnocchini-Messier said he worries that the country's growing population will become unsustainable at some point, and communities will be forced to clear forests to grow food and accommodate urban sprawl.

"This unbridled growth makes it impossible for our current infrastructure to meet the needs of the population without irreparably damaging the environment," Gnocchini-Messier says on his website. "We need to hit the pause button. We need to slow growth, including population growth."

Individual party members have proposed population policies before in Canada and the party's cousins internationally have pitched the idea as well. But in the last election, the Greens did not formally endorse such a policy. Instead, the party campaigned on bringing in more skilled workers, enhancing family reunification and addressing inequalities in Canada's immigration system 

At least one mainstream environmental organization has condemned theories linking overpopulation to environmental degradation, arguing they're rooted in white supremacy and ignore the fact that the real culprits are corporations, not individuals.

"Climate change and nature destruction directly result from the burning of fossil fuels, large-scale deforestation and industrial agriculture," said Salomé Sané, Greenpeace's Canada-based climate campaigner, in a statement to CBC News.