Non-profits can still make money and not even the Vancouver Aquarium itself claims that "All proceeds are directed back into rehabilitation and education programs". In 2015, only 15% of revenues went to Conservation, Research and Education. http://www.vanaqua.org/annualreport2015/assets/dist/pdfs/ann...

Your argument is vacuous because you aren't translating between "revenue" and "profit." If that "15% of revenue" was also "100% of profit", then they're doing exactly what you'd expect a non-profit to do. The real questions are:

1. how much un-needed overhead their expenses consist of, beyond the minimum costs required to run the facility;

2. the dollar-amount of donations that reach the relevant causes by having this type of facility operating, vs. the dollar-amount of donations that would be given to the same causes if this facility did not exist, or if it tried to operate on slimmer margins (by e.g. only being a marine-wildlife gift shop or somesuch.)

My own suspicion is that the answer to #1 is "not much", and the answer to #2 is "a far larger amount." (Under the argument: people don't bother to donate money to wildlife preservation if they're not being actively reminded of the existence of wildlife in need of preservation. That "15% of revenue" still likely ends up as a larger absolute dollar-figure than the total amount of donations to the same causes made by all other individuals or organizations in the area.)

Even if you don't agree with my suspicions, I think those two questions are the only good ones to be debating here.

OP said "All proceeds are directed back into rehabilitation and education programs." This is not true.

Pedantry fail. You know very well what "proceeds go to charity" means.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/proceeds.html

Nearly every non-profit in the world has expenses to cover first.

"Proceeds" is a synonym for profits, not for revenues. That was my point: "15% of revenues" might very well be the entirety of the proceeds, making their statement true. You have to do some accounting to prove or disprove that.

A non-profit can't produce profit, however they can pay their mgmt too much money.

Is that what you're accusing the Vancouver Aquarium of doing?

Not OP, but I work in nonprofit finance -- Their financials are here:

https://www.charitydata.ca/charity/vancouver-aquarium-marine...

It looks pretty innocent as far as these things go. They do ~$40M in revenue / expenses every year, spend $1.2M on fundraising, and their management expenses are high but not unreasonable. The biggest red flag I see is a large ($15M) loan that's costing them upwards of a million/year in interest.

Compensation seems pretty typical too, there's a more detailed compensation schedule on the Canada Revenue Agency's website but the link doesn't work externally. In short, there's 1 staff member making between $250k-$300k, there are 3 between $200k-$250k, and 6 between $120k-$200k.

There are plenty of non-profits that do questionable things. PETA clinics euthanize more animals that humane centers run by municipalities:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/05/pets-shelter-euthan...

If PETA had billions of dollars and spent all of it on building animal shelters for every single dog and cat, breeders and feral animals would quickly replenish the missing "stock". There will simply never be enough "animal shelters" to house every animal ever born. PETA offers euthanasia services because of this truth. I see nowhere on their website that states that they set out to provide shelters for all pets. There are many rational criticisms of PETA, but this is not one of them.

Animal shelters will always have to put animals down. I don't think people deny that.

But PETA appears to spend more effort putting them down than attempting to re-home them.