“In Montreal at that time, there was an us-versus-them mentality between the police and the citizenry,” says McKinnon. “There was this real thuggery in the police force.”

In the podcast, McKinnon interviews his parents, who often appeared in the press campaigning for justice and an overhaul of police training and procedures, and the conversations are still raw, three decades after Paul’s death.

The police officer who killed Paul was a 27-year-old rookie named Serge Markovic. After a gruelling seven years of court cases – which happened due to the tireless efforts by McKinnon’s parents in gathering evidence and pressuring authorities – he was eventually prosecuted and found guilty of dangerous driving. But he never spent a day in jail, instead getting one year of house arrest and a two-year suspension. McKinnon’s attitude towards him has softened over the years.

“I was so tired of being mad at him,” he says. “It takes so much energy to hate. He didn’t mean to kill Paul that day. I don’t think there was hate in his heart, like the George Floyd situation. I think he was poorly trained and there were a lot of systemic issues that contributed to what happened, so I have sympathy for him in that regard.”

As for his lost memories, McKinnon recognises that this was his way of trying to deal with the trauma. But during the making of the podcast, a remarkable thing happened. He interviewed Yvonne Clark, a social worker who was at the scene of the accident in 1990 and gave evidence in court.

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McKinnon had been friends with Clark’s children when he was growing up. She told him that he and his family changed her life. After what happened, she changed disciplines to become a grief counsellor, specialising in children. As McKinnon interviewed her, she started asking him questions in return.

“She said to me that it was obvious I’d never processed Paul’s death,” says McKinnon. “And she said she’d love to give me some grief counselling. So, she changed my life too, no question.”

Parts of those sessions are in the podcast. We hear McKinnon recover memories of Paul – helping a blind person across a street; sharing a conspiratorial smile while sitting in a barber’s chair. He hopes to get more pieces of the puzzle over time.

But the most significant thing happened after it was all done and the podcast became available earlier this year.

“For a while my full-time job was writing to people who contacted me,” says McKinnon. “When someone writes to you and says, ‘This podcast meant so much to me because my son died’, you can’t just write back and say, ‘Thanks for listening.’ You have to get into it. That’s been a part of this whole process that I never expected.

“I knew I had to be as honest as I could in approaching this story and not filter any of my emotions and not spare the terrible details. That’s what people identified with and responded to.”

And in the end, Alex McKinnon discovered something he didn’t even know he was looking for - that when it comes to loss and grief, he’s not alone.

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