Picking a Discount Brokerage

I started my quest for a discount brokerage by finding a list of them to go through. To do that, I started with CIPF, the Canadian Investor Protection Fund. It basically ensures a basic level of security. Basically, if the brokerage firm goes under, I still have my investments. So, onward to the list of members and their websites. It was quite a long arduous process involving to a lot of websites. There were a lot of private wealth management firms and few people offering self-directed brokerage. After having narrowed down the choices, I made a decision on what was important to me. I already have one account, which has some analyst coverage, so that wasn't too high on my list of priorities. The main reason, I was looking for a new place to try was the cost, I felt that I could get a better deal. Previously, I had decided that I was going to be a buy and hold investor rather than an active day trader. So, speed isn't critical, it can take an hour to execute a trade for all I care. It also means that monthly fees were going to be a deal breaker. I also didn't see myself getting a large sum of money any time soon, or trading more than once or twice a month. Using that, I kind of priced out my options and then searched for what kind of reputation the places had.
One option wound up being cheaper than the rest and the reputation seemed decent enough. Most of the complaints seemed to be from people who didn't know what they were doing whining about the same thing over and over again everywhere. The deal breaker for me was the lack of an unregistered cash account. Why this is a deal breaker is another discussion.
So, do I want a margin account? For many of the discount brokerages that I've been eyeing, the interest rate is prime+1%, which is 1.5% better than my student loans, which are prime+2.5%. Both are tax deductible as long as I use the money to invest in something that generates income other than capital gains. So this means no forex, no futures, no precious metals and no options. I seem to be ok with carrying my student loans. This brings forth a number of possible courses of action. Paying off my debts of course remains a possibility.
1) Pay off debts and staying debt free - I ruled this out earlier because I felt that I could get a better return than the interest rate on my loans
2) Pay off debts and buy on margin - Well, this would cause a bit of a delay in my plans, but overall it's not going to be all that long of a delay. I'd probably wind up borrowing very small amounts for quite a while.
3) Carry the loans and buy on margin - Part of the reason I'm ok with my student loans is because I know there's an end to it. I'm not too sure I want to borrow all that much
4) Carry the loans and don't buy on margin - More or less what I had originally intended to do
5) Carry the loans and use a margin account but keep borrowing limited - This is also something I'm fairly comfortable with. Though margin is kind of new to me.
6) Carry the loans, keep most of my investments in cash accounts and use a margin account sparingly or revisiting whether or not I want to use a margin account at a later date - This feels like the best course of action for now. See if I happen to have any trouble with a company before taking on more risk with them. I seem to have bad luck with CIBC related firms, such as the people who handle student loans, and their grocery store shell. Hopefully I won't have any trouble, but lets prevent the headaches.
So yeah, I went to the next one on the list, trade freedom. They're owned by the Bank of Nova Scotia, which I tend to have good luck with. At present, I'm not really expecting much trouble.