I was told at Tcl 2009 that Tk windows on X11 should no longer have a 32k pixel limit, and any such limitations should be reported as bugs.
A canvas item that is a frame can be much larger than 32k pixels, but the region that can be viewed by scrolling is never much more than 32k.
The attached file is a test that demonstrates the problem.
Tested on ActiveTcl 8.5.7.1 and 8.6.0.0b2, Linux x86 with X-server Xorg-1.5.3
Test size limitations of canvas window item