at the end of June 1969, Newman was dismissed from the company, later describing his eighteen months there as "a futile waste." Despite being offered an executive producership by the BBC, keen to regain his services on the very day he left ABPC, Newman decided to return to Canada. He left the UK on January 3, 1970, leading The Sunday Times to comment that "British television will never be the same again." Return to Canada Chairman of the NFB His first post upon returning to his home country was an advisory position with the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) in Ottawa, where he battled Canada's private broadcasters, especially CTV, over new Canadian content regulations. This lasted for only a few months, before in August 1970 he became the new Government Film Commissioner, the Chairman of the National Film Board of Canada, returning to the same institution for which he had worked in the 1940s. In this role, he experienced considerable problems in Quebec resulting from the fact that he did not speak French, at a time when the NFB's French Program branch was attracting young Quebec nationalist filmmakers. Some staff members also felt that he had been away from the NFB for too long, while the filmmaker Denys Arcand felt that Newman did not understand Quebec culture. Newman was able to improve the NFB's relations with broadcaster CBC, securing prime time television slots for several productions, although he was criticised by some filmmakers for allowing the CBC to screen NFB films with commercial interruptions. He also moved the NFB entirely over to color film production. However, the Toronto Star'''s Martin Knelman felt that Newman was "mired in political warfare and administrative chaos". He was responsible for censoring or banning several productions, including Arcand's On est au coton and Gilles Groulx's 24 heures ou plus. These films were concerned, respectively, with the conditions of textile factory workers and critiquing consumer society. Such censorship or banning resulted in some critics attacking Newman for being anti working-class and pro-capitalist. Newman had a mixed record with French-language films. He defended Pierre Perrault's Un pays sans bon sens! to a committee of parliament in 1971, but the same year personally rejected the release of Michel Brault's film about the October Crisis, Orders (Les Ordres). This was despite the fact that the film had already been approved by the board's French-language committee, and it was