man 5 hgrc implied you need to use external tools to do CRLF translation.
This is no longer true; win32text provides a much better in-process alternative.
import os
from mercurial import hg, ui, commands
u = ui.ui()
repo = hg.repository(u, 'test1', create=1)
os.chdir('test1')
# create 'foo' with fixed time stamp
f = file('foo', 'w')
f.write('foo\n')
f.close()
os.utime('foo', (1000, 1000))
# add+commit 'foo'
repo.add(['foo'])
repo.commit(text='commit1', date="0 0")
print "workingfilectx.date =", repo.workingctx().filectx('foo').date()