This is true, but bottle deposits are still a provincial incentive for recycling (to keep them out of landfills, etc) and all the infrastructure, processing, sanitizing, sorting, etc, actually costs more than producing new bottles. Like most post-consumer recycling here in Canada, the costs are shouldered in part by tax dollars, because there is no financial incentive to recycling glass, and so private companies wouldn't be reusing bottles because they don't generally feel that environmental and other concerns are their financial responsibility.
Ultimately, the breweries don't care whether or not they get their bottles back. For many of them, they'd actually rather NOT because it actually costs them more, but they're mandated to do so. The cost of metals, on the other hand, are high enough that metal is really the only material where the financial incentive alone is enough for private enterprise to be involved. There is a genuine financial loss to a brewery every time a keg is stolen. Heck, people are even stealing electrical wiring, metal piping, etc. I've seen instances of people having their exhaust pipes sawn off and stolen. There's a reason you'll never see a thief smash a car window and run off with the pieces of glass
There's a reason businesses dealing in scrap metal can operate privately and profitably, but recycling depots dealing with glass, paper, etc, cannot operate without government (and/or possibly charitable) funds.So no, keeping bottles is not the same thing as keeping a keg. Whether or not it's part of the criminal code in any particular neck of the woods, it's impossible to argue that the brewery is not losing money every time one of their kegs isn't returned. They are the victim of such an action, and the deposit exists because it is enough for most people to return them. If they wouldn't lose so many sales by charging $150+ deposits (they'd certainly lose more than they're losing right now in unreturned kegs), they would do it in an instant. Ultimately though, the keg deposit exists because it would hurt them even more NOT to have one. Bottle deposits, on the other hand, exist not in the breweries' interests, but for the interests of society - to minimize landfill space used, and even to keep the streets and other public spaces from being littered with broken glass, among other things. In order to achieve this, the government mandates bottle deposits in order to keep every bottle made to be reused or recycled as much as possible - breweries don't have a choice, and those that even care at all would benefit from NOT having to go through the process of reusing bottles. So even in Canada, when you keep bottles you don't just do the breweries a favor (or at worst make no difference to their bottom line), but you also continue adhering to the entire purpose of the bottle deposits in the first place, by keeping them in use, off the streets and out of landfills. So it can actually be argued that everybody wins (and without question, nobody loses) when you repurpose bottles for your own brews. Anybody thinking you can say the same for kegs is just delusional.
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