Axie made a good overview of things to do in Toronto in the JJ2 community LiveJournal. See here. I've done a little bit of searching on hotels in Toronto at hotels.com, and nightly room rates seem to be about $100-$200 (USD I think).

As for the NYC area, nobody has pulled together any details. So if you want the meeting to be there, you better start getting some info together for us. :P

If you want to try gathering some information, but don't know where to start, try looking up city web site. For example:
http://www.nycvisit.com/content/index.cfm?pagePkey=1
http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/visitors/index.htm

Something that would probably help us would be to have some of you call various hotels and ask them how well they could accomodate us. Sure, 20 people may not be a lot for a hotel, but it is a much larger group than they would normally get all together. For convenience (and possibly the sanity of others in the hotel), we'll probably want to stay close together within the hotel. We'll also want to know if we can get one larger room where we could possibly fit more people into. Also, if not for the number of people we'll have, at least for the duration, there might be some discounts we could get, but we'd need to know about them first. So some of you should take a little time to call around. If you need more details, feel free to ask me.

Velk also made a post in the JJ2 LJ concerning rooming arangements and activities that people should probably think about and post on. Post here.

I can see people are interested in this, as am I, but this meeting isn't going to plan itself (unfortunately). iCeD and I try to keep things moving because we're interested in this just as you are, but we can't plan this by ourselves. (You probably wouldn't want us to.) The reason WC2004 planning went so well was becase we had several people working on the planning, including a few people who actually knew the area we were going to be in. I have never visited either New York City or Toronto, but I know there are people who have, and it's those of you who could really be helping out.

I also have a feeling that those people aren't paying attention to either this thread or the JJ2 LJ, so something else you could do is talk to people about EC2005. Especially those who have expressed interest in comming, but haven't been posting comments. Then report back here or here so we can all know what's been talked about.