California keeps losing people, and now it’s losing fans.

One of Hollywood’s most beloved stars just said out loud what millions of Americans already know.

And Dan Aykroyd’s description of life in California is so brutal it’ll have Gavin Newsom reaching for his press secretary.

The Ghostbuster Goes North

Dan Aykroyd, the Canadian-born comedian and actor behind some of the most iconic films of the last 50 years, sat down recently for an interview and didn’t hold back when the conversation turned to where he chooses to live.

Aykroyd told the hosts that he spends most of his time in Canada now, and he made clear it’s not just a preference — it’s a deliberate choice driven by what he sees happening in American cities.

He called conditions in California “medieval.”

That word landed hard, and it was supposed to.

Aykroyd pointed to homelessness as the defining image of what California has become under years of left-wing governance. The state has thrown billions at the problem and the tent cities keep growing. Los Angeles looks the way it does not despite Democrat leadership but because of it.

And Aykroyd, who has watched this unfold from the outside, apparently noticed.

What Life in Canada Looks Like by Comparison

Aykroyd praised Canada’s quality of life, its healthcare system, and what he described as a general sense of order and functioning society that he finds harder to locate in major American cities right now.

He noted the cost of living pressures facing ordinary Americans and seemed genuinely puzzled that a country with so much wealth can produce cities where people sleep on sidewalks next to shuttered storefronts.

That’s a fair question, actually. California has the fifth largest economy on the planet by some measures. It also has the highest poverty rate in the country when adjusted for cost of living, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure. Those two facts living side by side say something about who California’s political class actually serves.

But here’s where it gets complicated. Aykroyd’s praise for Canada’s government-run healthcare system deserves some scrutiny even if his diagnosis of California is dead accurate. Canada’s single-payer system produces wait times that would be considered a scandal in any other context — Canadians wait months for procedures that Americans with good coverage can schedule in days. The Fraser Institute has tracked median wait times between referral and treatment at over 27 weeks in recent years. That’s not a feature. That’s rationing with a friendlier press office.

Praising that system while criticizing California’s dysfunction is a little like complaining your house is on fire and suggesting the neighbor’s slow leak is the better situation.

Still — and this is worth sitting with — Aykroyd’s broader point about California isn’t wrong just because his proposed alternative has its own problems.

What California Actually Became

The “medieval” framing is more precise than it sounds like a throwaway line. Medieval cities were defined by visible, grinding poverty existing right alongside concentrated wealth and power, with no real mechanism for the middle to hold. That’s a reasonable description of San Francisco in 2025. Or Los Angeles. Or Sacramento, where the people writing the homelessness legislation drive home to neighborhoods the homeless can’t reach.

California has enacted some of the most aggressive progressive housing and social spending policies in the country. The results are documented and measurable. Homelessness increased. Housing costs increased. Middle-class families left. The people who could afford to stay did. The people who couldn’t afford to leave got stuck.

Aykroyd is a celebrity, so his ability to simply choose Canada is not available to the single mother in Fresno or the retired machinist in the Inland Empire. But that’s almost the point. When even people who could live anywhere look at California and say “no thanks,” it tells you something about what the state has become.

And Aykroyd isn’t the only one saying it. The U-Haul data says it. The IRS migration data says it. The population loss that cost California a congressional seat for the first time in its history says it.

The Ghostbusters star probably wasn’t trying to make a political statement. He was just answering a question honestly. But honest answers about California tend to land like political statements these days because the honest answer and the Democrat Party’s preferred narrative are so far apart.

Gavin Newsom has spent years positioning himself as the competent, photogenic alternative to everything Donald Trump represents. He’s been road-testing a national brand built on California as a model. And here’s a beloved Canadian entertainer going on the record to say the state looks medieval.

That’s not the testimonial Newsom was hoping for.

The deeper problem for California’s political class is that Aykroyd isn’t a partisan figure. He’s not a conservative commentator. He’s not a think tank fellow with an agenda. He’s the guy who made Ghostbusters and Blues Brothers and spent decades as a fixture of Hollywood. When someone from inside that world looks at California and reaches for the word “medieval,” it’s harder to dismiss than when a Republican senator says the same thing.

And it raises a question that California Democrats haven’t answered convincingly: if the policies are working, why does the place look like this?

Nobody’s waiting on that answer from Sacramento.

Source: Fox News Entertainment, “Dan Aykroyd details ‘medieval times’ reality of California while praising life in Canada,” foxnews.com