Even before Christmas, Pauline Marois should send thank-you cards to Geoff Molson and Pierre Gauthier, respectively the owner and general manager of the Montreal Canadiens. And so should Jean Charest.
Marois desperately needs an "identity" issue to rally the Parti Québécois behind her shaky leadership and win back support the PQ has lost to François Legault's new soft-nationalist party, Coalition Avenir Québec.
And Charest, whose Liberal Party is a distant third in popularity among the French-speaking voters who decide most Quebec elections, needs the PQ to be more competitive to split the opposition vote more evenly with the currently dominant CAQ.
By naming a coach for the rest of the current season who can't speak French, Molson and Gauthier have created a language issue that might help Marois - and, by extension, Charest.
Legault, who needs to attract federalist support, has conceded the identity issues of language and religious accommodations to the PQ.
A Léger Marketing poll for The Gazette in November showed how much potential the language issue, in particular, holds for the PQ.
At the time the PQ was the overall choice of only 24 per cent of French-speaking voters. But 44 per cent chose the PQ as the party they trusted most to "ensure the vitality of the French language." It was the highest rating for any party on any issue in the poll.
Last Thursday, Marois issued an appeal with xenophobic overtones on the theme of "respect" for "us" to "affirm our Québécois identity" against minorities in areas including language. She said it is time to "stand up to have our Québécois language, culture and identity respected."
"What will be left of us as a people if we allow French to lose ground and our values to be trampled?" she asked.
There has been a loss of respect for "our language and our values. French is losing momentum," she said: "Our common values," including the "primacy" of French, are bring "constantly flouted - Only the Parti Québécois has the will and the capacity to re-establish the primacy of French in Quebec and to defend our common values and our identity."
Then, two days later, the Canadiens named their first head coach in 40 years who is unable to speak the language of most of their fans, and the only language understood by many of them.
The coach of the Canadiens is not an obscure vicepresident of a financial institution working in English high in a downtown Montreal office tower, out of sight and earshot of the public.
He is a boss who matters to a lot of people who don't work for him. He is one of the most visible - and audible - personalities in Quebec, on television across the province several times a week during the hockey season.
So for the next 3½ months at least, Randy Cunneyworth will be not only the personification, but also a constant reminder, of an apparent loss of status in Quebec for French and those who speak it.
And the more often he has to explain losses by the Canadiens in subtitled or translated English, the less popular he will be.
This gives the PQ an opportunity to repeat the 2007 exploit of Mario Dumont, whose Action démocratique du Québec successfully used controversies over the accommodation of religious minorities to make identity an issue outside Montreal.
The PQ can use Cunneyworth to try to bring the language issue home in the French-speaking regions where elections are won or lost, but where voters seldom are frustrated by a lack of service in their language.
It might be only a slim hope, and it might get slimmer if Cunneyworth turns the Canadiens into a winner. But for even that slim hope, Marois - and Charest - should be thankful to Molson and Gauthier, even before Christmas.
dmacpherson@montrealgazette.com