With five candidates on its roster, the Yukon Green Party is gearing up to for its biggest campaign yet.

The party, which formed in the spring before the last election, is running three more bodies than it did in 2011.

“Our goal is to run as many candidates and as quality candidates as we can,” said Frank de Jong, the party’s interim leader.

As it stands, the Greens have de Jong running in Pelly-Nisutlin, former leader Kristina Calhoun going for the Riverdale North seat, Philippe LeBlond running in Copperbelt South, Mike Ivans in Porter Creek North and Julie-Anne Ames in Lake Laberge.

This will be the Yukon Greens’ second election, and its first election without Kristina Calhoun at its helm.

Calhoun, who has been leader since the party’s inception, resigned her post last week, citing personal reasons.

The former leader could not be reached for an interview before today’s press deadline. Mike Ivans, the Green candidate in Porter Creek North, said Calhoun, who is a stay-at-home parent, “felt she couldn’t be a candidate, leader, and mom all together.”

She will, however, stay on as the Green Party candidate in Riverdale North.

Ivans was one of two Green candidates who ran in the 2011 election (Calhoun was the other).

Neither Ivans nor Calhoun won a seat but together they picked up 104 votes, 0.7 per cent of the total ballots cast.

At a party meeting last Thursday, Ivans and de Jong both tossed their names in to replace Calhoun.

De Jong was made leader in a vote by the “dozen or so” members (according to de Jong) who were in attendance.

Ivans estimates the party currently has about 10 members.

De Jong, a teacher in Faro, ran for the Green Party of Canada in the Yukon in the last federal election.

Though he took time off to campaign in 2015, he can’t afford to do the same this time and will do his door-knocking after school hours, he said.

If elected, de Jong said, he will quit his job at Del Van Gorder School and serve as full-time MLA.

In an interview with the Star on Tuesday, de Jong had some choice words for how the Pasloski administration is handling climate change, a key issue for the Yukon Greens.

“The Earth is facing a climate change catastrophe and the Yukon Party is fiddling,” he said.

“They’re, like, AWOL on the issue, it’s terrible, it’s shocking.”

De Jong is in favour of a revenue-neutral carbon pricing scheme.

He proposes a system in which Yukoners get a cheque in the mail once a month to offset the additional amount they spend at the pumps.

“Pasloski is disingenuous because everyone knows that the idea of a carbon tax is to be revenue-neutral, but he ... plays dumb and says it’s a new tax,” said de Jong.

The interim Green leader was also critical of the Yukon’s electoral system.

The first-past-the-post system “punishes minority opinion,” he said, and puts pressure on Yukoners to vote strategically.

Under the current, first-past-the-post system, a party can win the majority of seats in the legislature without winning a majority of the total votes cast.

De Jong suggested that first-past-the-post discourages people from voting for a small party like the Greens if they fear a major party they dislike will win.

He wants to see proportional representation in the Yukon, a system in which seats are divided up in proportion to the total number of votes received by each party.

De Jong also railed against the Catholic school system, saying that taxpayers in a secular jurisdiction should not be funding a religious institution.

“It’s discriminatory to other religions (that do not get public funds for education) and it’s certainly dead wrong to fund a religion that’s sexist,” he said.

Catholicism is sexist, de Jong said, because women can’t be priests, cardinals and popes.

“(It’s) ridiculous that we’re funding such a sexist religion,” reiterated the grade school teacher, adding that, “it’s basically indoctrination of children.”

The Green Party came out against the Catholic school system in May, when the party issued a press release calling public funding of the institution “morally indefensible.”

“Catholics are fair minded and justice oriented and shouldn’t be put in a morally difficult position of receiving unfair privilege,” Calhoun said in the release.

As for whether de Jong will seek leadership of the Yukon Greens at their annual general meeting in 2017, he said, “I don’t know, there’s good chance of that, we’ll see how it goes in this campaign.”