You can have some control over this with the tag style site setting. Changing the tag style to “simple” should give you what you are looking for. Otherwise, you can set the style with CSS in your site’s theme.
Another approach that you could take would be to add the featured tag to a tag group. That would allow you to configure the tag so that it can only be seen by your site’s staff members:
For more details about tag groups, see Tags: category restrictions, tag groups, relationships.
Hey, I think we’re both in Nanaimo! It’s great that you’re using Discourse!