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Mocked for his red-and-white gym gear and derided for hailing from a nation of seal clubbers, an Ottawa-born teenager says he dropped out of a Christian school in Upstate New York because staff relentlessly teased him over his Canadian background.

“I think it started as joking and then it went too far,” said Noah Kilpatrick, speaking by phone from Watertown, New York.

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Attending Faith Fellowship Christian School was otherwise fine, said Noah, but in class the teacher would often lampoon Canada as a cartoonishly small country filled with communists and people who club seals for fun.

“History class and sometimes math class … they were stereotyping Canadians and saying we were all stupid — it was offensive,” he said.

When Noah paid for his school lunch with a toonie after forgetting to bring greenbacks (the two currencies were at par, he noted later), the same teacher, who is also the school’s principal, allegedly held up the coin at an assembly to publicly remind students that toonies are not legal tender.