[john.gersh]

Layers have a front-to-back order among themselves, too. (Click the disclosure triangle next to the canvas name to see the layer order.) Since you can control which layer is in front of another, it wouldn't make sense to control object order independent of that. In fact, if object order didn't respect layer order, then the concept of layers wouldn't work. You can reorder the layers in a canvas, including shared layers, by dragging them.