November 1st, 2025 | ALLAN RAY

Beware Of Childless Leaders

If they don't have a stake in the future, can we trust them with it?

Public leadership is, at its core, a promise to be a steward of the future. Every budget, every law, every negotiation is an act of shaping a world that will exist long after the next election. When a leader is visibly anchored in a family future, when they have children or grandchildren, there is at least a private reminder that the future is not just a policy concept but a literal home their offspring will inhabit. When a leader does not have that, or has deliberately arranged a life without those stakes, the future becomes abstract. It becomes a concept on a page rather than a dinner table conversation. That is not a moral judgment about anyone’s personal life, it's an observation about incentives and emotional wiring.

In politics, incentives determine horizons. A person who is raising children tends to think differently about long-term costs, about deferred risks, about what sort of society their children will inherit. A person who is not raising anyone and has no generational stake will naturally see the world through a narrower, shorter lens. It is not cruelty, it's psychology. The danger arises when such people are given immense power. Because without that private tether to the human future, they begin to treat governance like a game of ideas. They value ideological purity over continuity, and they gamble with the social fabric because the cost will fall on other people’s children, not their own.

History is full of examples of childless rulers who lost that basic human sense of continuity. Men who saw their nations as experiments and their people as numbers. Men who sought control or redemption through power because they had no private legacy to leave. When you take the generational chain out of a human being and then give them command over the lives of millions, you create something that is structurally less empathetic and more dangerous. The Canadian context is not immune to this dynamic.

Look at Alberta. Danielle Smith, Jason Kenney, and Naheed Nenshi have all occupied enormous space in the province’s political story. Each have power unanchored from generational accountability.

Danielle Smith is married and a stepmother, but she has no biological children of her own. Her life and career are built around commentary, business, and politics. Her political personality celebrates enterprise, deregulation, and immediate reward. Everything about her rhetoric centers on winning for ideological reasons. When she talks about “the next generation,” it sounds like a slogan, not a lived truth. She promotes extraction and deregulation, celebrating short-term growth without much interest in what kind of Alberta will exist when the oil runs out or when the water dries up. That lack of biological stake does not make her evil. It makes her freer to treat the province as an economic experiment. The caution she lacks is not intellectual, but emotional. She will not have to watch her own child inherit the damage.

Jason Kenney was even starker. He is unmarried and has no children. His reputation is that of a tireless ideologue. He reads philosophy alone at night and treats politics as an intellectual calling rather than a family duty. It is easy to admire his energy and his dedication, but that same detachment from domestic life made him reckless and out-of-touch. When he led Alberta, he ruled like a man building a monument, not a home. His sense of consequence was abstract. When a man has no descendants, the future stops being something personal. It becomes an idea, and ideas are expendable. Kenney could gamble with the social contract because there was nothing in his private life to remind him of the people who would have to live inside it.

Kenney could party in the Sky Palace while the rest of us couldn't dine out, or go anywhere without a surgical mask. He had no wife or grown children to bring him down to Earth and show him the disconnect, only his political circle of fellow dwellers in the Ivory Tower.

Naheed Nenshi presents the same problem dressed in urban polish. He is unmarried, has no children, and carries himself like a celebrity. He is slick, clever, and self-assured. There is something faintly sleazy about his performance of virtue, that smiling insistence that he alone understands the province's soul. He speaks endlessly about inclusion and opportunity, but his relationship to any future generations is symbolic, not lived. He does not go home to a family. He goes home to himself. His policies as mayor of Calgary were often showy and image-driven. He governed as a brand, not a patriarch. That works fine when times are good, but it breeds danger when times turn hard. A leader who has never been bound by the quiet discipline of family responsibility tends to see politics as performance art. The result is a politics of gesture rather than structure.

Maurice Duplessis, the long-serving premier of Quebec, lived and died a bachelor with no children. He ruled his province with a heavy hand, treating Quebec as a fiefdom rather than a home. When the Great Depression struck, he had no idea how to respond. He had no family, no children, no understanding of what it meant to be responsible for those things in a crumbling economy.

His authority was paternal in tone but not in spirit. He cared about power itself, not about who would inherit it. His reign was long, controlling, and suffocating. It showed what happens when a man mistakes control for care. The state becomes his offspring, and citizens become wards. The absence of real generational tether makes that transformation easy. Duplessis is a reminder that a leader without heirs will try to create them in the form of subservients, not people.

None of this means that all leaders with children necessarily care about the future, or that they even love their own children more than they love themselves. But we should be cautious and curious about the lifestyles of those we elect to lead us into the future.

When a leader has no personal stake in the future, when they have no children and no family to raise into the world they shape, the emotional feedback loop breaks. The leader begins to value the present more than the future. They chase short-term victories, symbolic gestures, ideological wins, and short-lived applause. The human cost becomes invisible. The risks of policy are shifted onto other people’s children. The long-term consequences become somebody else’s moral problem.

That kind of governance produces fast movement and dramatic headlines, but it hollows out the moral core of leadership. It becomes managerial, technocratic, and performative. It forgets that a nation or a province is not a project, it is a family of families.

The danger is not theoretical. History is full of examples of rulers who had no children and ruled like they were trying to outwit mortality itself. From Hitler to Stalin to Napoleon’s later imitators, the pattern repeats: obsession with control, fascination with legacy, detachment from ordinary human feeling. When there are no children to humanize a ruler, there is only ambition to consume him. That instinct can take many shapes, from the flamboyant authoritarian to the narcissistic liberal technocrat. The result is the same. The people become the raw material of the leader’s story. The future becomes a theatre of self-justification.

Canada likes to imagine itself immune to that pathology, but it's not. The modern childless or single leader performs empathy through slogans while building systems that mortgage the future. They talk endlessly about “our children’s future” while never knowing what it means to stay up at night worrying about one. They believe in plans, not people. They believe in narrative, not legacy.

We should never pretend that a leader’s personal life is irrelevant. It is the foundation of their horizon. When someone has children, the next century is not abstract; it is their child’s lifespan. When someone does not, the next century is a page in a history book. The stakes are different. The risks they take are different. The temptations are stronger, because there is no personal cost to losing the future. They can always claim they served history, even as they poisoned it.

When a politician has no children, we should ask them directly how they imagine the future. What makes them feel its weight? What holds them accountable to it? If the answer is their career, their ideology, or their party, then we are already in danger. Because those things die with them. The only enduring moral tether to the future is the existence of others who depend on it. Without that, power floats free.

A democracy can't banish such leaders, but it must treat them with caution.

The argument here is not prudish. It's existential. Civilization is a chain of care, a sequence of people investing in futures they will not see but that their children will. When that chain is broken, when the people at the top of the hierarchy live as though time ends with them, politics turns predatory.

Alberta’s political class now mirrors that danger: a premier without children, a predecessor who is a lifelong bachelor, an opposition leader who treats politics as a game he wants to win for himself. They rule a province full of young families, yet none of them truly have one. They make decisions for generations they will not be a part of. That gap is not a private matter, it's the essence of the political problem.

We should beware the childless ruler, not out of moral disgust but out of civic realism. They are freer to gamble. They are more likely to treat human life as a policy variable. They are less likely to feel the bite of their own mistakes. And that detachment, however elegantly it is presented, is a danger to every citizen who must live in the world they leave behind.

We are right to demand more from them. We are right to doubt their instincts. We are right to ask what future they think they're building, and for whom. Because if they have no children, who are they building it for? Do they really care about it at all?