to the dispute between the Bermuda Telephone Company and the Telecommunications Commission about the company's plans to raise domestic rates.

The Commission's decision last month, which was reviewed in chambers in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, refused to allow BTC to raise domestic rates by as much as it wished and also refused to allow it to cut staff without the permission of the Commission.

We said then that neither BTC or the trade unions representing its staff would have much to cheer about. Since then, the company has tried and failed to reduce its staff's working hours.

Now BTC has won leave to have the whole decision placed under judicial review.

The Telecommunications Commission attempted to make a judgment of Solomon in its decision; it tried to save jobs, it tried to please the consumer facing higher telephone costs and it tried to give BTC a little more income. In doing so, it ran the risk of pleasing no-one, and in hindsight, it may have gone beyond its powers.

The Telecommunications Commission is charged with advising its Minister on policy and with recommending rates telecommunications companies can charge for its services. It can also determine what services a carrier provides, even if the service is unprofitable.

But it does not appear that the Commission has the right to dictate to a company how many staff it should employ or in what areas. At a time when competition is opening up, and BTC is belatedly moving from being a monopoly to defending its turf against presumably lean and mean competitors, it is unfair to tell it that it must maintain exactly the same staffing levels while it is also facing dramatically reduced revenues.

CEDARBRIDGE AND CHANGE EDT CedarBridge and change The announcement that Ernest Payette will be leaving CedarBridge Academy to return to Canada at the end of the school year will leave mixed feelings among many observers of the education scene.

Bermuda has many reasons to be grateful to Mr. Payette. He was given the daunting task of developing an entirely new system of secondary school education and to lead a new school which was politically unpopular and untried. Beyond that, the tremendous cost of the school itself meant that CedarBridge could not afford to fail.

As if that was not enough, Mr. Payette and his staff encountered early discipline problems and shockingly low levels of literacy which required a radical change in the teaching approach.

Throughout, Mr. Payette has remained firm in the face of adversity, and with CedarBridge's second year more than halfway over, he and his staff and the school's students have much to be proud of.

Discipline is better and the school is gradually putting itself on the map.

Now he is leaving and it is to be hoped it is not too soon. Whoever succeeds him will have a tough challenge in building on the foundations which have been laid. If his successor comes from within the school, it is to be hoped that Mr. Payette has trained him or her well.