becoming the first woman from Quebec to become a minister of the Crown and the sole female in that Cabinet. Sauvé ran again in the election two years later, re-winning Ahuntsic, and was given the environment portfolio until 1975, when she was appointed Minister of Communications. In the 1979 election, Sauvé won the riding of Laval-des-Rapides, but the Liberals lost their majority in the commons to the Progressive Conservative Party; she thus lost her Cabinet position. She remained MP for her riding after the federal election of 1980, which saw both the Liberals returned to majority position and Trudeau returned to position of prime minister, and Trudeau indicated Sauvé as his choice for the Speaker of the House of Commons. Because she strongly desired to campaign for the "No" forces in the weeks leading up to Quebec's 1980 referendum on separation from Canada, Sauvé initially refused the offer to run for the non-partisan position. But she eventually acquiesced after Trudeau convinced her that she was the right person for the job and she received permission from the leaders of all the parties in the House of Commons to engage in the federalist campaign in Quebec. She became the first female Speaker of the House. In her early days as speaker, Sauvé often made mistakes with the names of MPs or the ridings they represented—once calling on the Prime Minister as the "leader of the opposition"—and occasionally miscarried procedural rulings, which led to MPs addressing her with increasing curtness. Further, all 32 of the New Democratic Party MPs in the house walked out in protest of what they viewed as a bias on Sauvé's part; they felt she allowed Liberal MPs to ask more questions than those from any other party. In a CBC interview, Sauvé conceded that the NDP members may have been right that the Liberals may have been allowed more questions over two or three days, but, on the whole, each party received an equal number of opportunities. It was also speculated that MPs had taken to showboating for the television cameras that had recently been installed in the chamber. Sauvé did, however, find success in implementing reforms that professionalised the speaker's tasks of managing expenses and staff for the House of Commons, cutting back on the excess bureaucracy, personnel, overtime waste, and costs she discovered upon her installation. Once the changes were made, Sauvé had reduced the