Are you a student looking for something to do next summer?

Brad Duguid, Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU), has a plan for students. They can volunteer at the 2015 Pan Am Games and have their pre-study OSAP contribution waived or have the province pay the interest on their student loans for a year after graduating.

Tanya Blazina, a spokesperson for MCTU, says it could amount to $2,800 in relief for an estimated 3,500 returning students.

For another 1,000 student volunteers who graduate in 2015 the government will pay the interest on their OSAP loans for one year.

According to the Labour Force Survey, in 2013 Ontario had a summer unemployment rate of 22.3 per cent for full-time students aged 17-19 and 15.1 per cent for students aged 20-24. For students with jobs,  54 per cent only found part-time work last summer.

“The issue isn’t that students don’t have the experience to get ahead in the labour market, the issue is that there’s not enough jobs for them,” said Alastair Woods, the chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students – Ontario (CFS-O).

Duguid says student volunteers would work, “probably very long shifts. When you volunteer for the games you’re volunteering to work pretty close to full-time on them, if not full-time,” for the six-week period during the Pan Am and Parapan Am Games.

“We want to make sure that students can’t qualify for the break by simply putting in a couple of hours of time and then not showing up anymore,” said Duguid. “They’ll be a very stringent record kept of volunteers and the hours they put in.”

The ministry estimates a graduating student with $20,000 in student loans could save up to $1,400 by having one year’s interest waived.

According to Blazina, student volunteers who want to qualify for the OSAP break will be required to work 12 shifts during the Pan Am games and six shifts during the Parapan Am Games. An exact number of required hours was not provided.

“I think the plan is a little bit ridiculous. I actually don’t think that it’s going to provide significant support to students that need it the most,” said Woods. “It follows this piecemeal approach to financial assistance where rather than create a comprehensive system of non-repayable grants they’ve turned financial assistance into an episode of Extreme Couponing.”

There are 18 venues for the games skirting Lake Ontario from Welland to Oshawa. The venue furthest north is the Caledon Equestrian Park, just south of Highway 9 between Newmarket and Orangeville.

According to Woods, students from outside the GTA voiced their concerns to MCTU Assistant Deputy Minister Nancy Nalyor at the CFS-O Annual General Meeting in Toronto on the weekend.

“Many of our members from northern Ontario said, ‘How is this going to help us? Are we going to be expected to fly down to Toronto and stay in a hotel just for an opportunity to not work and volunteer for almost a month?’ I think there’s a geographic disparity there and I don’t think the government thought it through very well,” said Woods.

Duguid said, “students outside the GTA that want to volunteer are absolutely welcome to, but they’ll have to find ways to get down to the Toronto area or some of the other venues that are north of Toronto.”

Students who want to volunteer can fill out a form on the Toronto 2015 website.

 

Correction: An earlier version of this article had CFS-O Chairperson Alastair Woods identifying MCTU Deputy Minister Deborah Newman as being at the recent CFS-O meeting. It was, in fact, Assistant Deputy Minister Nancy Naylor who was questioned by students from northern Ontario. The Dialog regrets the error.