New Twist to an Old Problem in Quebec : Canada: The restive province’s Francophones were once victims of bigotry. Now, critics say, some French speakers treat Indians and blacks as 2nd-class citizens.

Throughout much of their history, French-speakers in the province of Quebec suffered economic discrimination at the hands of an English-speaking business elite. Francophones traditionally worked the shop floors and assembly lines; les anglais called the tune from the executive suite.

That isn’t so in Quebec today, but the painful memories linger. It is this history of linguistic discrimination, as much as anything else, that today prompts Quebec residents to seek separation from English-speaking Canada.

From outside Quebec, however, critics argue that if the province’s Francophones have a nation of their own, they themselves will treat their minorities as second-class citizens. A string of ugly events is fueling this argument, including a recent flap over youth hockey.

Every winter for the last 32 years, Quebec City has hosted a 10-day International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament in which 12- and 13-year-old skaters battle for one of the most prestigious trophies in Canadian youth sports. The competitors know they are following a proud tradition: Such hockey greats as Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux played in Quebec City before going on to the National Hockey League.

This year, 105 teams from 10 countries are expected to enter the competition, including a team from Thompson, a Manitoba town with a large native Canadian population.

But when team manager Bev Morin called up Alex Legare, the tournament president and organizer, to get information on lodging, what she heard made her think twice about sending her boys.

“He said, ‘Are there Indian children on your team?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ ” said Morin, who is herself native and has a son on the team. “He said, ‘Well, we don’t billet Indian children in our homes.’ It was the first thing he told me.”

Morin said Legare then told her that native skaters always stay at an Indian village outside town. It struck Morin as the discredited “separate-but-equal” standard of the segregated U.S. South.

“It really floored me,” she said. “Who is he to say where we belong as a race?”

An angry Morin took her story to the media.

“Indian Players Not Welcome in Quebec City” and “Officials Reel From Racism,” shouted the Winnipeg Free Press. A reporter said Legare had asked her, “Would you have them in your home?” And word leaked out that Quebec families who had put up native skaters in the past had complained that the youngsters didn’t wash.

Legare has sinced chalked up the whole incident to a misunderstanding--the kind that can take place when Anglophones and Francophones communicate by phone. But native groups have nevertheless been trying to get an anti-discrimination ruling from the Canadian Amateur Hockey Assn., and Morin said she is wondering whether Legare’s remarks represent the general thinking of Quebec.

Indeed, the hockey flap came at a time of acute racial tension in the province. Last year, provincial police brought things to gunpoint by suiting up in full riot gear and storming a barricade that a group of Mohawks had set up on ancestral land slated to become a golf course. The Mohawks complained that native women and children were in the white officers’ line of fire.

That incident prompted other Mohawks to take up weapons and seize control of a commuter bridge leading into Montreal. Massive traffic jams ensued, prompting white suburbanites to burn Indians in effigy and stone cars carrying Indian passengers.

Then, last summer, Quebec’s normally circumspect premier, Robert Bourassa, waded in with a complaint that it was Indians who were foiling Quebec’s constitutional dealings with the rest of Canada and Indians who were blocking a multibillion-dollar hydroelectric project that Quebec wants to complete on traditional Cree lands in the far north.

Natives are fighting the dams, but Bourassa’s remarks were nevertheless interpreted as yet another made-in-Quebec slur against Indians.

“In English Canada, where respect for individual rights is assumed, it would be unthinkable for a mainstream politician to attack a racial or linguistic minority,” wrote Carol Goar, a columnist for the Toronto Star.

Blacks have also taken their lumps in Quebec of late. Mysterious Ku Klux Klan flyers began appearing in Quebec mailboxes earlier this year. And in July, a group of working-class whites descended on some blacks who had moved into their Montreal neighborhood, pelting them with beer bottles and rocks, setting one of their cars on fire and chanting, “White power!”

The same week, an unarmed black man in Montreal was shot and killed by police who mistook him for someone they were trying to arrest; the victim bore no resemblance to the suspect, except that both were black.

All told, six men have been shot and killed by Montreal police in the last four years, and all were either black or Latino. At an inquest into the most recent shooting, tape recordings revealed repeated police references to noirauds , or “darkies.”

And this month, when Montreal police were called to help a 15-year-old black who was being harassed by three whites at a subway station, the arriving officer grabbed the teen-ager and held him at gunpoint, ignoring the whites.

Quebec’s own human rights commissioner recently complained in a newspaper interview that activist groups have been exaggerating abuses against blacks. He accused the English-language media of highlighting Quebec’s racial incidents as a way of picking on Francophones, citing in particular some news stories on the Klan leafleting.

“I’m not sure that in a pre-referendum period, it doesn’t suit the interests of the Anglophone media to say that all Quebecers are not angels,” Yves Lafontaine told La Presse. (Quebec is scheduled to hold a referendum on the question of provincial sovereignty by next October.) His remarks left the Chinese Professional and Business People’s Assn. calling for his resignation and prompted Rabbi Reuben Poupko of the Canadian Jewish Congress to call a news conference and say, “We fear that we have a fox guarding the chicken coop” on human rights in Quebec.

With the protests mounting, Montreal Mayor Jean Dore has called for racial calm and declared his commitment to “a pluralist vision of our city.” Quebecers in general say their province is no more racist than any other part of Canada.

Indeed, police officers have shot unarmed blacks in Toronto and elsewhere, and natives come in for heavy doses of discrimination no matter where in Canada they live. English-speaking Canadians have demonstrated their own small-mindedness by booing the national anthem when it is sung in French at sporting events.

There has been a spate of stories out of the National Hockey League about Anglo Canadians calling Francophone teammates “frogs.”

But in the dispute that has widened between Quebec and the rest of Canada these days, Anglophones will argue that while their part of the country may have its isolated bigots, Quebec makes ethnocentrism a matter of public policy.

Quebec has banned outdoor signs in languages other than French, for instance. And it has required immigrant children to attend French-language schools, even when neither they nor their parents speak the language well. Quebec officials have even flirted with policies that would ban children from speaking languages other than French in casual settings, such as school playgrounds.

Back in Manitoba, Morin said she has decided to let her charges play in the International Pee-Wee Tournament in February. But the boys will stay in a hotel. And she will accompany them, watching to make sure they are not mistreated because they are Indians.