It's a great question. In fact we try to eliminate the publisher as an intermediary between the game and the market. The beauty of digital marketplaces, like the Apple App Store and Google and Facebook and so on, is that as a developer you can go straight to the market without a publisher if you have your wits about you and the means to do so.
The challenge there, of course, is discoverability. If everyone can go straight to the market, then you are among a million others who have done the same thing. You then have to be smart about marketing and PR and how you acquire users, etc.
So there's still a challenge there, but the challenge is less about “I'm a developer with a product and I have no publisher to save me”, than it is about “I'm going straight to the consumer so I'll have to fight it out with all the other people who went straight to the consumer.” How do I get noticed in all that noise?
It's a separate discussion about the evolution of the role of the publisher, more so as a partner for marketing and discoverability, but no Canadian studio should be sitting around saying, “No publisher wants me.” We should be sending them all straight to the market.