Commons in 1978. LaSalle had referred to finance minister Jean Chrétien as a liar on three occasions and refused to apologize. The rest of the NDP caucus supported LaSalle's suspension. Rodriguez was re-elected to a third term in the 1979 federal election, as the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark won a minority government. He was appointed as NDP Labour Critic in the parliament that followed. In late 1979, Rodriguez emerged as the most prominent member of the NDP's "Left Caucus", a successor group of sorts to The Waffle. In a The Globe and Mail interview, Rodriguez said that the new group differed from The Waffle in that its ultra-left elements were minor and that it would abide by the results of NDP conventions, even if it did not agree with them. The Left Caucus was nonetheless opposed by the party leadership, which argued that it would hurt the NDP's chances of winning an election. Rodriguez spearheaded the group's only successful motion at the NDP's 1979 convention, protesting a jail sentence handed out to Jean-Claude Parrot of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. The Clark government lost a non-confidence motion in late 1979, and Canadians returned to the polls for another election in 1980. Rodriguez was defeated in Nickel Belt by Liberal candidate Judy Erola. Some local Progressive Conservatives later indicated that they ran a deliberately weak campaign to consolidate the opposition vote around Erola. Rodriguez criticized the Liberal campaign for portraying him as a borderline Marxist. After leaving office Rodriguez returned to a high school principal position. 1984 to 1993 Rodriguez was re-elected to the House of Commons in the 1984 federal election, as the Progressive Conservatives won a landslide majority government under Brian Mulroney. Rodriguez was appointed as his party's critic on Unemployment Insurance (UI). In late 1984, he took part in a series of public forums organized by the NDP on the Mulroney government's record of job creation. Rodriguez served on the Commons Standing Committee on Labour, Employment and Immigration from 1984 to 1988. He was a vocal critic of the Forget Commission's 1986 report on Unemployment Insurance reform, arguing that its reforms would drive Canadian social policy back to the nineteenth century. (One of Forget's recommendations was that persons unemployed for more than a year be forced to live on benefits as low as $40 per week.) Rodriguez later supported a committee report that rejected most of