Tenants facing rent increases of 50, 75 or even 100 per cent in several Winnipeg apartment buildings should be taken seriously.

Increases such as these can be devastating for seniors on fixed income or families already stretched by the cost of living.

I’m familiar with the buildings in last Saturday’s article (Tenants slam Alta.-based landlord, protest rent increases, Sept. 26). Before the buildings sold, the same group had owned them for decades. Many rents were around $500 a month, maintenance had been put off for years, and some of the buildings were nearly unlivable.

Unfortunately, this isn’t unusual in Manitoba. Existing housing policy has led to the oldest rental stocks in the country, with tens of thousands of units at or past 50 years old. Keeping them livable will take hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a bad time to make reinvesting in apartments even less attractive and put thousands of construction jobs at risk.

When the Manitoba legislature returned to session on Tuesday, Sept. 29, former Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba leader Obby Khan, who resigned as leader and from the party on Sept. 28, took his seat as an independent.

He joined a small group that rarely gets much attention — the members who sit outside the recognized parties. With him, there are now four.

How the legislature treats them says a lot about how seriously it takes the voters who sent them there.

Under the Rules of the Legislative Assembly, a party needs four members to be recognized.