GUATEMALA CITY Basking in the glory of a landslide in Guatemala's presidential

election, a former comedian with no government experience has some unorthodox

policy plans: he will tag teachers with GPS trackers to ensure attendance and give
poor kids smartphones.
Jimmy Morales, 46, who sailed to victory with 67.5 percent of the vote on an anticorruption platform, has said little about how he would curb gang violence or stem
the flow of migrants to the United States, leaving a cloud of uncertainty over key
issues.
"No other candidate has been called everything from a clown to a populist, but the
smartphone is the least populist (idea) that there is," Morales said in an interview on
Monday, the day after his massive win. He will take office in January.
He plans to start with a pilot program in schools in 45 of Guatemala's municipalities,
and said it would cost the government nothing.
"We are going to give (the telephone companies) school and government walls to
paint their brand logos on to compensate them," said Morales, adding that he has
been in contact with Telefonica, Tigo and Claro, some of the country's largest
telecom operators.
Morales rode a wave of voter outrage over a graft scandal that toppled former
President Otto Perez last month, making the fight against corruption his central
pledge and playing up his status as a political outsider.
But critics have called some of his policies eccentric and said his ideas on how to
deal with some of Guatemala's major challenges, such as violence and
undocumented migration, are vague at best.
Morales said Central America's largest economy should focus on bolstering criminal
investigations to tackle lawlessness, instead of resorting to the military, allaying
fears that his party's ties to the armed forces could lead to a larger role for the
military during his four-year term.
Some founders and lawmakers of his center-right National Convergence Front (FCN)
party are veterans of the military, which has raised concerns among many
Guatemalans because the army massacred thousands of indigenous Maya in
Guatemala's bloody civil war from 1960 to 1996.
He said a Honduras-style militarization would not work for Guatemala, even though
it has helped to stem gang bloodshed in its Central American neighbor, which has
one of the world's highest murder rates.
"We bet more on criminal investigations," he said in the interview. "Investing in
security doesn't do anything if the justice system does not work."

He floated the idea of assigning an engineering unit within the military, one of the
country's most opaque institutions, to build roads and bridges.
"Given there is no war, we don't need combat," Morales said, adding that the
country could save money by using the military to build infrastructure.
He also described as "ridiculous" a 1 percent mining royalty that is paid to the
government by foreign and domestic mining companies and said it was time to
review the law.
"Investors may not be interested, but it may be that Guatemala is not interested in
letting them take away its gold and nickel at very low prices," said Morales, who
quickly added, "I haven't said 'no' to mining." He declined to offer a time frame for
such a review.
His stance against corruption is clear. He vows to audit institutions, increase the
Attorney General's budget and make government spending more transparent.
He has also promised to renew the mandate of a United Nations-backed body called
the Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, whose investigation into a multimillion dollar customs racket led to Perez's downfall.
(Editing by Simon Gardner, Toni Reinhold)

OTTAWA It started as a lark: A party needed somebody, anybody, on the ballot for
an unwinnable seat in Quebec, and some friends nominated Ruth Ellen Brosseau, an
unknown single mother in her 20s who worked in bars and did not even live
anywhere near the district.
Then it was a fluke: She won the seat in 2011 without ever campaigning for it, riding
a tide of voter dissatisfaction with the status quo and the last-minute popular
appeal of the partys leader at the time, Jack Layton.
Now her story has become an underdogs triumph worthy of a Frank Capra movie: In
one of the bigger upsets of the Canadian elections last week, Ms. Brosseau handily
won re-election to Parliament, even as her party, the left-leaningNew Democrats,
took a beating across the country.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE

Justin Trudeau Is Expected to Set a Pragmatic, Not Partisan, Course in CanadaOCT.

21, 2015

For Canada, Most Noticeable Change Under Justin Trudeau Could Be ToneOCT. 20,
2015

The voters had many surprises up their sleeves last week. Instead of the close
national race with no clear winner that was forecast by opinion polls, they delivered
a sweeping victory and governing majority to Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party
and ejected incumbents on both the right and the left.
Photo

Ms. Brosseau, campaigning in Louiseville, Quebec, in August. She admits to

shaking like a leaf the first time she rose to speak in the House of
Commons. CreditChristinne Muschi
A fair number of those defeated incumbents had been so-called paper candidates
like Ms. Brosseau, obscure slate-fillers who lucked into office in 2011 when the New
Democrats benefited from voter defections in districts where they never expected
to be competitive.
Few of them, though, seized their good fortune with both hands quite the way Ms.
Brosseaus supporters say she did. Facing critics in the establishment who
sneeringly suggested that she was unfit for office, she studied hard, learned the
needs of her constituents and is helping to fight a David-and-Goliath battle for
homeowners whose houses are crumbling beneath them. And she made an
impression.
We need more people like her in government, Grard Jean, the mayor of Lanoraie,
Quebec, a town in Ms. Brosseaus district, told The National Post, a newspaper
based in Toronto. She is someone who, because of where she comes from, is really
close to people.
Even Ms. Brosseau, now 31, acknowledges that her move into politics was hardly an
obvious career choice.

Though Quebec tends to lean leftward, the New Democrats had had very little
success there, winning only two seats in the previous 50 years. Still, to be taken
seriously as a national party, it had to field a candidate in every district. So some
politically active friends who frequented a bar where Ms. Brosseau worked asked if
they could put her name forward.
Far from hitting the campaign trail, Ms. Brosseau went ahead with a long-planned
birthday bash with friends in Las Vegas, a trip that later drew mockery in the news
media, calling her the Vegas Girl.
And after she won anyway part of a wave of 59 New Democratic candidates in
Quebec whose surprise victories were attributed in part to deep dissatisfaction with
the separatist Parti Qubcois her press coverage turned even more scathing,
focusing on her having given birth as a teenager and her lack of a college degree.
(She started community college but did not finish.) One headline in The Toronto Sun,
a Conservative-leaning tabloid, declared that Ms. Brosseau debases politicians.
Ms. Brosseau tried to ignore the media, reveling instead in her newfound
responsibilities and in a lawmakers salary that, for her, was an economic windfall.
After struggling for years to earn enough to support her son, sometimes working
three jobs at a time, she would now get 157,733 Canadian dollars a year (worth
about $150,000 in 2011), not to mention generous benefits and a pension plan.
Suddenly, my cellphone blew up, my email blew up, Ms. Brosseau recalled in an
interview. For the first few months, I kind of kept my head down and decided, Im
going to give it all I have got to give.
It did not help that her mainly rural electoral district was a three-and-a-half-hour
drive from her home in the Ottawa suburbs, nor that, as a vegetarian, she had little
in common with the many pork- and beef-producing farmers in her constituency.
She credits Mr. Layton, who died a few months after the 2011 election, with helping
her through her early days in office, when she was intimidated by her loss of privacy
and by the challenge of learning the basics of elective politics on the job.
Mr. Layton assigned Kathleen Monk, his spokeswoman, to be her mentor. He also
lent Ms. Brosseau his personal French tutor, to buff up a language that she had little
opportunity to use while growing up in Kingston, Ontario, and working in Ottawa,
but that she would now need to communicate with most of her new constituents.
Ms. Monk said she was offended by much of the news coverage of Ms. Brosseau. All
kinds of horrific stories were written about her, Ms. Monk said. But her story was
so much more relatable to most Canadians.
Ms. Brosseau did her homework. She attended as many public events in her district
as she could and held town-hall-style meetings and informal coffees to introduce
herself and learn about local concerns.

I did a lot of everything, Ms. Brosseau said. I had to build relationships, and I had
to build bridges.
What probably saved her seat last week, though, while many of her colleagues in
Quebec were going down to defeat, was her decision to take on the most local of
issues: complaints from homeowners about defective concrete used to build house
foundations that are now falling apart.
At least 2,000 homeowners were affected, and in many cases the repair bills have
come close to equaling the value of their houses. Some families were covered by
new-home warranties, but others have been bankrupted by the cost.
Litigation is underway, but it may drag out for years. In the meantime, Ms. Brosseau
has been fighting to get the federal government to join the province in providing
compensation for homeowners.
The departing Conservative government said no, but the Liberals promised during
the election campaign to work with affected homeowners, a promise that seemed
largely to be the result of work by Ms. Brosseau and another New Democrat from
Quebec, Robert Aubin (he, too, was re-elected). Ms. Brosseau said she planned to
hold Mr. Trudeau to his partys vow.
Jason Luckerhoff, a professor at the Universit du Qubec Trois-Rivires who is
studying the matter, estimates that Ms. Brosseau raised the concrete issue 70 times
in Parliament no small accomplishment for a junior member of an opposition
party who admits to shaking like a leaf the first time she rose to speak in the
House of Commons.
When she was elected, at first, people were very, very skeptical, Dr. Luckerhoff
said. There was a lot of joking around. But it was astonishing how quickly she
became respected.
Though Ms. Brosseau now has a home in her district, her son Logan, 14, lives in
their house in the Ottawa suburb of Gatineau, Quebec. Her parents, who also live
there, help out as caregivers when she is on the road or tied up in Parliament,
assistance that Ms. Brosseau said had been vital to her new life.
She said she was thrilled that her work allowed her to provide Logan with more
financial stability and the type of middle-class life she had growing up.
Ms. Brosseau, like many New Democrats, is no supporter of Mr. Trudeau, but she
does share his idealism about the power of politics and the public good.
One of the reasons I signed up to be a paper candidate in 2011 is that Im an
N.D.P.er and I wanted to make the world a better place for single-parent families,
she said. I got bit by the political bug; its in me, and it will always be in me.