Yes, you can have two separate lists for items arriving later.
Explanation:
When you do a soft landing and don’t bring anything with you, you can still give a “Goods to Follow” list (Form BSF186A) to customs.
That list can include:
a) Items that will come later by container or shipment, and
b) Items you plan to bring personally when you move permanently later.
Both types can be shown in one “Goods to Follow” list, or you can make two separate lists if you want (one for shipment, one for personal luggage).
The key is: you must declare all future items during your first landing so they can enter duty-free later.
If you didn’t give any list during your soft landing, then customs may treat later imports as regular imports, and you might have to pay duty/tax.
This is, in my opinion, all wrong. Most do NOT need to declare all future items upon soft landing.
A soft landing is when someone comes to complete the formalities of becoming a PR - and usually just those and sometimes other admin formalities (to ease the process of arriving later).
This is NOT the same as arriving to 'settle' for customs purposes. Customs is aware of these and do not look at 'permanent resident' status as being the same as 'residing' (just as CRA does not consider PR status on its own to be the same as tax residency). Even getting a SIN does not automatically trigger this.
There is no need - whatsoever - at soft landing to declare your goods to follow, either that you will bring with you or ship, unless your 'soft landing' is in fact your actual/permanent landing.
I'll grant there are some cases where someone might wish to do so - eg if they're moving (permanently) only a short period afterwards, and it's more administratively convenient, or some other personal reason. But it's not required.
And yes, I'm sure of this. The whole point of a 'soft landing' is that the individual does not settle right away, and usually does not know exactly when they will - and of course may not have already booked flights and almost certainly not 'arranged for moving' all of their stuff and made the lists and other docs required for the final move. Sometimes this can be years after soft landing - so just not practical.
And there should not be any problem as long as in the interim (between soft landing and date of return to settle permanently) the (now) PR doesn't take on most of the attributes of having settled permanently (working and residing full time, basically.
