Seeking Solutions for Multi-Project Affinity Diagramming in Canvas View

Hi, has anyone run into an issue where they want to use the canvas view to do some affinity diagramming with highlights across multiple projects? being limited to only highlights in one project is causing us a bit of a headache. to get around it we created a new project and duplicated all the data we need to have in the canvas, but that is less than idea. has anyone found a more effective work around to this?