TORONTO - A "lavish" federal ad
campaign aimed at promoting Canada student loans is a waste of money
that ought to have been spent on debt reduction and interest relief,
advocates for loan reform said Tuesday.
Access to
Information documents obtained by the Vancouver-based Coalition for
Student Loan Fairness suggest Ottawa has spent more than $2 million on
the campaign since February.
Nearly $1.4 million alone was used for public relations while the rest went to creative production and focus group testing.
Calling
the campaign a "massive and wasteful spending spree," Coalition founder
Julian Benedict said the government should instead be putting that
money towards reducing student debt and interest payments.
"What
we need to do is improve the services that we provide to students and
that means reducing high interest rates on student loans," Benedict
said.
"One of the other things we've been pushing for
is the introduction of a national student loans ombudsperson to make
sure borrowers have representation in the system when things go wrong."
Ottawa announced it would be launching an ad campaign in April but did not say how much it would cost.
Human
Resources and Social Development Minister Monte Solberg said the ad
campaign is crucial to securing the future of Canada's work force.
Government
research has found many people from low-income families overestimate
the cost of post-secondary education and underestimate their ability to
secure financing, he said.
"We know we simply have got
to find a way to get more people into college, university, trade and
tech schools than we are today or we won't be able to meet the labour
market demands of tomorrow," Solberg said.
"So we are
unapologetically advertising very heavily to make people aware that
there is assistance available to them, and when people do take out
student loans, it's a very good investment in their future."
The
multi-media ads, which can be seen on television, in buses and at
transit stations across Canada and on the Internet, are meant to
highlight the loan program's flexibility in accommodating the
individual needs of borrowers.
Benedict, however,
argues many of the ads promote the loans while offering little
information about them or simply advertise the government's revamped
$23-million student loan web portal.
"It's really just a feel-good campaign," he said.
At
least one ad, however, does focus on the fact "everyone is unique" and
has "different goals, different ambitions and different dreams."
The
federal government took on a massive review of the student loan program
in an effort to modernize and improve delivery and announced a variety
of changes in the 2008 budget.
The changes include
up-front cash grants to students from low-and medium-income families
and further assistance for the 20 per cent of students who are
struggling to repay their loans, Solberg said.
"We've
made huge changes," he said. "In fact, they're the most fundamental
reforms to student financial assistance in a generation... so we are
stepping up to the plate."
Still, Benedict argues the
changes are merely administrative and do little to improve the service
itself or reduce the cost of borrowing.
"I think that
the program is under so much criticism because it's so poorly run that
a feel good PR campaign is their way of resolving problems instead of
actually fixing the system," he said.