Graham Hughes/CP People's Party of Canada Leader MaximeBernier speaks during a candidate nomination event for the upcoming federal byelection in the riding of Outremont in Montreal on Jan. 27, 2019.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Maxime Bernier, the founder of a right-wing party running in Canada's October federal election, said on Monday that Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's warnings about the dangers of white supremacy were an attack on an "entire ethnicity."

Bernier, a former Cabinet minister who quit the Conservative Party last year to form his own faction called the People's Party of Canada, has focused on limiting immigration and promoting free trade.

His comments on Monday were in reference to last week's move by the Trudeau government to change a report on terrorist threats in Canada that was first published last year to no longer explicitly mention "Sikh extremism."

"We're told the word Sikh was removed because 'entire religions should never be equated with terrorism.' And yet, (Trudeau) has been warning us for weeks about the dangers of 'white supremacy,' equating an entire ethnicity with terrorism," Bernier wrote on Twitter and Facebook.

"Hypocrite! It's all about pandering for votes," he wrote.