ST. PIERRE AND MIQUELON, France -- This tiny outpost of the Old World boasts that it will be the first place in the New World to officially ring in the next millennium -- a claim that rankles with its only neighbor, the Canadian province of Newfoundland.

Newfoundland has staked exclusive claim to the millennial honor and is hoping to attract celebrants from across North America for a waterfront bash in the historic port city of St. John's.

But denizens of St. Pierre, 12 miles off Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula, insist that the continent's new age will start on their wind-scoured remnant of the once-vast empire known as New France.

"The year 2000 arrives first in St. Pierre," says Jean-Pierre Andrieux, hotelier and historian of France's last North American colony, population barely 6,000. "You only have to look at your wristwatch to see the fact of this."

The dispute boils down to geography vs. the clock's tick-tock.

Cape Spear, Newfoundland, just outside St. John's, is indisputably the most easterly point of land on North America. And that, according to Newfoundlanders, settles the question.

"As the earth turns, Newfoundland is the first place on North America to greet the dawn and will be the first place on North America to greet the new millennium," says Robert Thompson, deputy minister of tourism.

Not so simple, say the French, insisting that time is on their side -- and that Newfoundland has only its own peculiar time zone to blame.

Odd time zones

For the Canadian province marks time 30 minutes off-kilter from the rest of the continent. When it is 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and noon Atlantic Standard Time, for example, it is 12: 30 p.m. in Newfoundland, a chronological oddity that has forced generations of Canadian Broadcasting Company announcers to advise listeners: "News on the hour; on the half-hour in Newfoundland."

St. Pierre occupies a time zone that is an hour ahead of Atlantic time, or a half hour in front of Newfoundland. So inevitably as, well, clockwork, midnight on St. Pierre falls 30 minutes before midnight on Newfoundland. And that, say islanders, means that the next day, the next year, the next century and -- "certainement!" -- the next thousand years arrive in the French islands precisely one half-hour before it comes to Newfoundland.

"The time difference is a simple fact," says Andrieux. "We'll be celebrating the arrival of the millennium first. This is not a trick or gimmick -- it's an official time zone. It's been this way for years."

There is irony in St. Pierre's sudden claim to being the continent's millennial front-runner. After all, inhabitants of the French "territorial collectivity" -- the euphemism preferred over "colony" -- have for most of their history adamantly insisted on a European identity.

(Another irony is that purists who insist that the millennium will not arrive until 2001 find this whole dispute pointless.)

The pungent blue haze of Gauloise cigarettes fills the cafes, and the French tricolor snaps over the Place du General de Gaulle, waterfront square of the island cluster's main settlement. Pay phones accept only francs; all calls to and from the enclave are routed through Paris; Citroens and Renaults rattle along the narrow streets. People watch French TV, beamed in by satellite, and speak French with a Parisian accent, not the Quebecois or Acadian dialects of French Canada.

An audacious affront

Newfoundlanders are appalled by what they see as an audacious affront from an unloved neighbor.

"It's spiteful, that nonsense from the French," says Jack Noseworthy, a mariner from Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula. "They are troublemakers and always have been. They just want to pirate the millennium."

More is riding on the controversy than mere bragging rights.

Newfoundland, a starkly beautiful but impoverished province, is seeking to market itself as the place to be on North America when 2000 rolls in. Officials and businesspeople are hoping television crews and free-spending millennium-trippers will make cash registers jingle down on Duckworth Street, St. John's main thoroughfare.

But St. Pierre, picturesque but unvisited in mid-winter, would like a cut of the action -- and sees the 30-minute time difference as a credible lure.

"So tell CNN the real party will be here," says Andrieux.

The island cluster, which includes the island of Miquelon, has long been a thorn in Canada's side.

Feuds over fishing rights, maritime borders and smuggling operations carried on beneath the indifferent eyes of French gendarmes have vexed both Canadian and British officials for centuries. Newfoundland, which became England's first New World possession in 1583, joined Canada only 50 years ago.

The proudly Gallic inhabitants of St. Pierre survive on economic subsidies from Paris, fishing, rum-running and summer tourism, in roughly that order. During Prohibition, St. Pierre was a major conduit of bootleg alcohol to the United States, and the occasional hangout of Al Capone.

'Traditions live on'

Today, Newfoundland's hefty taxes on liquor and cigarettes ensure that adventuresome souls with fast motorboats will never lack for economic opportunity. Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have grown hoarse complaining that France refuses to take smuggling seriously.

The racket works this way: St. Pierre entrepreneurs legally import huge quantities of tobacco and alcohol from the United States, far more than the petite French settlement could possibly consume.

"Enough booze and cigarettes to keep every man, woman and poodle in Paris drunk and coughing for a year," sardonically observed a Mountie assigned to anti-smuggling activities a few years ago.

Most of it, of course, is spirited across the channel to Newfoundland.

"The old traditions live on," says Andrieux.

At a glance

St. Pierre and Miquelon is the only part of France's North American colonial empire to remain in French hands. It consists of two groups of rocky islands near the southwest coast of Newfoundland.

Capital: St. Pierre

Area: 93 square miles.

Population (1997): 6,862, mostly fishermen.

Chief exports: Fish products.

Government: Overseas Territorial Collectivity of France. Elects one deputy and one senator to the French Parliament.

Pub Date: 3/06/99