A rent hike that more than triples the current rate has put the future of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health facilities on College and Russell Sts. at risk, according to a CAMH official.

Negotiations with the hospital’s landlord, a numbered company controlled by Brookfield Asset Management, have hit a wall, according to Dev Chopra, CAMH’s executive vice president of corporate service and redevelopment.

The property owner wants CAMH to pay $4 million a year in rent starting in April 2018, up from $1.2 million now, Chopra said.

“In the current fiscal environment, every dollar counts,” he said. “Hospital budgets have been frozen for the last few years. So an increase in rent of some $2.8 million will have a serious adverse impact on our patients, and I believe on Ontarians seeking mental health services.”

CAMH’s College St. location is home to the province’s only round-the-clock emergency psychiatric emergency service. Staff treated 9,000 patients last year, up from 3,500 five years ago.

CAMH also has research facilities there, from brain-imaging equipment to highly customized labs, that would be too expensive to move, Chopra said.

“Just to rebuild our research facilities is hundreds of millions of dollars. We just don’t have that kind of money,” he said.

CAMH has asked for an arbitrator to settle the dispute. There is a court date scheduled at the end of the month.

Andrew Willis, Brookfield’s senior VP of communications, read the Star a short statement: “At Brookfield, we value our relationship with all our tenants, including CAMH, and we are working hard to resolve this issue.”

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. has head offices in Toronto and New York. The company has $27.9 billion in assets in Canada, including First Canadian Place and Queen’s Quay Terminal, among other Toronto properties.

CAMH is coming to the end of its 20-year lease, signed in 1998. It has the option to renew for two 20-year terms.

The rent for the next term is to be based on the property’s current market value. CAMH has pegged the value at $26 million, since the lease says the land is for hospital use only, Chopra said.

But the landlord’s estimate is $100 million, based on the “highest and best use of lands assuming they were vacant,” he said.

Another disagreement about a rent increase between CAMH and its landlord was settled in 2006 with the threat of arbitration looming.

Councillor Joe Cressy (open Joe Cressy's policard) said the property owners appraised the land according to what it would be worth if condo towers were built there.

The land is zoned institutional, not mixed-use, and neither the city nor his office would support any change, he said.

“When we’re trying to break the taboo of mental illness, this is exactly the wrong time to be forcing out services like CAMH provides,” he told the Star.

“Cities are more than just residential condo towers. Cities are also the institutions that allow us to live and care for each other.”

Ralph Daley, the president of the Grange Community Association, a group of resident-volunteers from Grange Park, said he thinks the situation that Brookfield has put CAMH in is “appalling.”

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He blamed the province for selling the land to a private developer in the first place.

The Ontario government sold the 34,200-square-foot lot to the current owner for $16.3 million in February 2004, property records show.

When he first heard the news of the rent increase, Daley said he was incredulous. “I wasn’t aware that the province, in its profound stupidity, had sold the land a number of years earlier,” he said.