This project investigates the ways in which the logics of security have influenced Canadian foreign development policies and practices. In particular, it examines what has become known as the security-development nexus (Duffield, 2001), and how this nexus has precipitated a shift in the role of Canadian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in the restructuring of Haiti. I offer a parallel reading of the history of policing/security and development and reposition questions about the contemporary security-development nexus within a long-established political and economic process anticipated by notions of security forged during the Enlightenment. This imperial thinking has produced a multiplicity of pacification projects that include Haiti. Thus, I show that the work of contemporary Canadian NGOs in Haiti can be better understood within the broad historical project of police science.