Delisle Doucet

Megaphone vendor Delisle Doucet was born in the middle of a blizzard on a tiny island up British Columbia’s coast, called Minstrel Island. The combined absence of a hospital and the blizzard blowing resulted in his mother giving birth to him on a kitchen table. “I was almost born on a boat,” he notes. Doucet first started selling street papers in Victoria in 1994, when it was called Redzone Magazine. “I like being a vendor because it’s rewarding,” he says. He moved to Victoria with his family when he was very young. Delisle remembers when Victoria’s streets were filled with the colourful, spiked hair of punk rockers, and when coffee cost just ten cents a cup. “The thing I like about Victoria is it’s so close to the mountains,” he says.